The house of twenty thousand books / Sasha Abramsky.

Includes index.

Prologue I: Saying goodbye Prologue II: Saying hello Master bedroom: The citadel The hallway: An extraordinary portal The kitchen: Salt, sugar, and a dash of love The front room: The Haskalah The dining room: Rituals and rebels Upstairs front room: Roots Dining room resurgent: RebirthFront room revisited: endings

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is at once the story of a fascinating family and chronicle of the embattled twentieth century. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos. "-- Provided by publisher.