The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

by Edmund de Waal

Upon the family inheritance of 267 Japanese netsuke (tiny wood and ivory carvings)  de Waal began a pursuit to trace this collection and its homes.  His journey encompassed several years as he traversed five  generations of the Jewish Ephrussi family and the story became a family memoir as well.

On his website, de Waal says,”I have spent the last few years writing a very personal book.  It is the biography of a collection and the biography of my family.  It is the story of the ascent and decline of a Jewish dynasty, about loss and diaspora, and about the survival of objects.” 

de Waal is a noted ceramicist for whom tactility and holding of objects inspires stories and it is with this sensibility he embarks on this quest.  His approach is meticulous, intellectual, and at times, obsessive.  As he begins to “know” the first recipient of the netsuke, de Waal reads volumes of local art magazines, novels, and newspapers of the era.  This is a rigorous scholarship that he employs throughout his research.  While one can get bogged down in the details he uncovers, it is a testament to his commitment and need to understand his family.

The Ephrussi family began in the schetls of Poland and their migration to Odessa where it developed an international grain company and had its beginnings as a 19th-century banking empire.  The two patriarchs, Leon and Ignace, move their families to privately built mansions in Vienna and Paris.  They also built lavish country homes across countries.  Both families believed that “assimilation” was the way to integrate into the intellectual, cultural, and artistic salons and businesses of their adopted lands.

However, the anti-Semitism of their neighbors and “friends” rears its ugly head in  both subtle and overt ways, culminating in the Nazi “Anschluss" in Vienna and Hitler’s rampage across Europe.  The descriptions and revelations therein are detailed and abhorrent and, for me, resonate in the “never again” meme of the Holocaust.  Loss after loss is noted: the tangibles of artwork, furniture, homes, and, most importantly, identity, personhood, and life.

de Waal’s journey does not end there; rather, it continues until present time.  His portrayal of Japan, post-World War II is remarkable and the stories of those who survived the war are equally beguiling.

Published in 2010,  The Hare with Amber Eyes won the Costa Biography Award along with other prestigious prizes. de Waal lives in London and, in 2019, created a “Library of Exile” installation at the Venice Biennale which has travelled to several locations.  “It is about exile…what it means to have to move to another country, to speak another language.”  His story still resonates.

— Nancy Crowley