Passing Through . . . .

An excellent review of an outstanding read

“How objects get handled, used and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question,” writes Edmund de Waal, a potter and a professor of ceramics. He doesn’t mind, for instance, his creations leaving his studio; letting things go is his living, but it is what happens to all our things eventually. In _The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), de Waal tells the astonishingly complicated and involving story of 264 netsuke, handled, let go, and handed on until he inherited them years ago. He inherited the netsuke (the hare of the title, and frogs, tigers, a couple making love, beggars, plums, and all the rest), and he inherited the responsibility of caring for them, but he felt, too, that he had a responsibility for the many people in his family who had owned the collection. Telling their story is part of that responsibility, and his book is part memoir, part history lesson, and part genealogical study. It is sweet and sad and compelling.

The netsuke originated in Japan in the 1700s, and were bought by De Waal’s great-great-uncle in Paris, part of the fashion for things Japanese in the nineteenth century. Charles Ephrussi was serving as his family’s representative in Paris, a Jewish family centered in Odessa on the Black Sea which had become hugely successful and wealthy as grain brokers and bankers. Charles shows up in the famous Renoir painting _The Luncheon of the Dinner Party_; he’s the guy in anomalous formal dress with top hat. The netsuke were housed in a vitrine that was meant as a showcase but also was meant to be opened allowing the little figures to be picked up and handled. Charles was so hugely rich he was initially untroubled by the Parisian anti-Semitism of the time, but it was there. The diarist and collector Edmond de Goncourt was jealous of him, and was disgusted that the salons were “infested with Jews and Jewesses.” Maybe it was during the Dreyfus Affair, in an attempt to show how French he was, that Charles’s taste began to concentrate on contemporary French art. The netsuke became a wedding present to his cousin Viktor in Vienna. Viktor Ephrussi (the author’s great-grandfather) married the Baroness Emmy Schey von Koromla in 1899. The netsuke were shipped to Vienna to be installed in the immense Palais Ephrussi, where Emmy kept them in the vitrine in her dressing room. Catastrophe came when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. Viktor was forced to sign everything away in order to escape, an escape aided by the legal brilliance of the older daughter Elisabeth. Emmy discretely killed herself on the way, and Viktor managed to end his days in England with Elisabeth and her husband, the author’s grandparents. The netsuke were furtively saved by Emmy’s personal maid, returned to Elizabeth after the war, and further given to her brother, who bequeathed them to the man he had adopted as a son for legal reasons, who in turn bequeathed them to the author, who now keeps them in London.

It is quite the journey. The author has recapitulated much of it, visiting each house which the family used to own, with many reflections on the loss of status and the loss of property. “Two years of looking at the scribbles in the margins of books, the letters used as bookmarks, the photographs of nineteenth-century cousins, the Odessan patents of this and that, the envelopes at the backs of drawers with their few sad aerogrammes. Two years of tracing routes across cities, an old map in one hand, lost.” It isn’t all bleak; there are funny stories about eccentric aunts and uncles here, and some tales of real heroism. It is a moving and dramatic family memoir, alternating restrained expressions of feeling with objective history and geography. It also has much to tell about the meaning and power and endurance of beloved objects of art.

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