The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Upon the death of his great-uncle, Edmund de Waal inherits a collection of very old, very small Japanese netsuke (including a hare with amber eyes). de Waal knows that the collection was first purchased by a distant forebear living in Paris in the mid-nineteeth century, and made their way to his branch of the family tree as a wedding present to his great-grandparents, the staggeringly wealthy - and Jewish - Viennese couple Viktor and Emmy Ephrussi. Smuggled to safety by a former employee under the noses of the Nazis during World War II, the netsuke are practically all that remain of the Ephrussi empire, which, at its height, stretched from Odessa to Vienna and Paris.

de Waal, not incidentally, is a sculptor. As such, The Hare with the Amber Eyes is as much an art history as a family history. The art history particularly consumes the first part of the book (Paris), to the extent that I would suggest anyone interested in reading this book for the descriptions of Imperial Austria and inter-war Austria (which are, like de Waal's relatives, simply staggering), should skip the first portion. Where the book truly shines is, as I said, in the second portion (Vienna). Here, de Waal takes readers on an architectural and cultural tour of the the Austro-Hungarian empire (and later Austria) including, necessarily and tragically, the rising anti-Semitism that eventually leads to the downfall of the Ephrussi fortune.

Because of my personal interest in Japan, I found the third (Tokyo) section almost as intriguing as Vienna. Again, de Waal does a great job of combining the socio-cultural aspects of the larger society (in this case, post-war Japan) with his family's history and, of course, the netsuke.

I learned of de Waal's memoir from Glenn Kurtz's Three Minutes in Poland, who describes the Ephrussis once, in comparison to his own family who were, "unlike the Ephrussi family...not part of the cultural aristocracy of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe." They - and The Hare with the Amber Eyes - lived up to their billing, although I imagine that, similar to Kurtz's own work, this one also has a somewhat limited audience.