Chimen Abramsky’s Memory

    If anyone read this blog they would recall, if their memory is better than mine, that I have at times posted about people with good memories. That is to say, people who had the ability to retain information, not people who had only good things to remember. I have also written about libraries. This post is about both these things.

    

     The gentleman with the amazing memory is Chimen Abramsky who amassed a significant library full of books about Judaism and socialism. The rest of the house in which the books were housed was also often packed with interesting intellectuals.  Recently Chimen Abramsky’s grandson, Sasha Abramsky, devoted a book to the bibliophile and in one of the reviews, here is what I noticed about the subject of memory:

“According to Abramsky, Chimen’s father Yehezkel, a legendary rabbi whose funeral in Jerusalem in 1976 was attended by forty thousand mourners, possessed a photographic memory. By age eight, Yehezkel had memorized the Pentateuch and would astonish the locals in his village in Eastern Europe by reciting any Jewish religious text he was asked to reproduce. Chimen, who was born in 1916 in what is now Belarus, himself evinced similar prowess: “In the rare instances,” writes Abramsky, “when Chimen could not respond to a question off the top of his head, he knew exactly which of his tens of thousands of books contained the answer, what page the information was on, and where along his many double-stacked bookshelves the volume could be located.” (“The Man With 20,000 Books”, Jacob Heilbrunn, The National Interest, Dec. 20, 2015.)

Additional Sources:

For an interesting video by the author that describes the collection and which includes comments by his grandfather click on the link inside this description at the New York Review Books.

See also the author’s background piece in “Lives & Letters: House of Books,” The Guardian, Jan. 1, 2011- “Visiting his grandfather Chimen as a boy, Sasha Abramsky would discuss socialist doctrine over matzo-ball soup with Isaiah Berlin and other great thinkers of the day.”

For reviews:  “ ‘The House of Twenty Thousand Books’ Re-creates an Intellectual Milieu,” Michael Dirda, Washington Post, Oct. 7, 2015.

‘The House of Twenty Thousand Books’, by Sasha Abramsky,  by Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times, July 18, 2014.

For other memory pieces in this blog see the posts for: Chomsky, Porson and Empson.