In July 1920, when my grandfather Chimen was nearly four years old, the town of Smalyavichy, in which his father Yehezkel was the rabbi, was besieged. It had changed hands several times during the ...

Chimen Abramsky, who has died aged 93, was a Jewish intellectual, historian, book collector and bibliographer of world renown. Although he wrote many academic papers, he published few books. Yet his ...

Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), 336 pp., $27.95. In his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin observed, “ownership is the most ...

It is difficult to think of a private house with 20,000 books. But this is what Chimen Abramsky's house was in north London. Chimen's life was as remarkable as his collection. He was born in Minsk in ...