The hare with amber eyes: A family’s century of art and loss, by Edmund de Waal

If you approach this book not knowing anything about either the author or the author’s family, as I did, you will be amazed as you turn the pages at his fascinating and unique heritage.  De Waal himself is, evidently, the premier potter working in England today.  This memoir begins and ends with the netsuke, 264 of them that were collected by his great-great uncle Charles Ephrussi.  De Waal now owns them, including the “hare with amber eyes,” and how these tiny, intricate ivory and wood Japanese carvings came to be handed down from one generation to the next is the center point around which the book revolves.  I did not know about the Ephrussi family – a Jewish family at one time as well-known and wealthy as the Rothchilds.  Charles not only collected the netsuke, but he collected, and commissioned, work from such friends as Renoir and Monet and was a model for Swann in Proust’s Remembrance of things past.  Charles is just one of many intriguing and important members of the extended family who we get to know.  With palatial homes in Paris, Vienna, and banks in other European capitals as well, the Ephrussis were an early target during the Anschluss, so this is also a Holocaust memoir.  

But overall it is a meditation on art and the importance of things, and the memories attached to them, in one’s life.  As the writer says, “If I choose to pick up this small white cup with its single chip near the handle, will it figure in my life?  A simple object, this cup that is more ivory than white, too small for morning coffee, not quite balanced, could become part of my life of handled things.  It could fall away into the territory of personal story-telling:  the sensuous, sinuous intertwining of things with memories.  A favoured, favorite thing.  Or I could put it away.  Or I could pass it on.  How objects are handed on is all about story-telling.  I am giving you this because I love you.  Or because it was given to me.  Because I bought it somewhere special.  Because you will care for it.  Because it will complicate your life.  Because it will make someone else envious.  There is no easy story in legacy.  What is remembered and what is forgotten?  There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories.  What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?”  I suspect not everyone will be as enthralled with this book as I was, but I highly recommend it.  354 pp.