The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

As lebres são o símbolo da fertilidade e também são ariscas e difíceis de se pegar. Uma das 264 esculturas da coleção herdada por Edmond Waal é de uma lebre que dá nome ao livro e se torna o símbolo dessa busca das origens da família do autor. A coleção de micro esculturas japonesas, netsuquês, leva Edmond a uma peregrinação pelo mundo para descobrir seus antepassados e reconstruir as histórias daqueles que antes dele foram os donos daqueles adoráveis objetos. Trata-se da família Ephrussi de banqueiros e comerciantes de grãos que se espalhou pela europa e chegou depois aos EUA e ao Japão. Após mais de uma centena de anos como milionários com bancos espalhados pela europa os Ephrussi tem todos seus bens confiscados show more na Áustria na segunda guerra com a perseguição aos judeus e na Rússia com a revolução bolchevique. O livro não é rancoroso nem esnobe, mas denso, franco e sutil. O autor é um ceramista famoso e seu texto é tátil e sentimos nos dedos suas descrições. Seu olhar de escultor e artista plástico percebe sutilezas em cada objeto e quando analisa fotografias consegue desvendar com um pouco de ironia e uma certa melancolia os pensamentos dos retratados. Poderíamos achar que a vida de pessoas que tiveram vidas tão diferentes e excepcionais seria muito diferente das nossas, mas nos sentimos próximos de cada personagem, e ao final nos damos conta que somos como os pequenos netsuquês estamos todos juntos na mesma vitrine e tão pouco sabemos de como aqui chegamos quanto para onde o tempo vai nos levar. show less

This is an unusual family memoir, told through the medium of the history of a collection of netsuke which the author inherited from his great-uncle. Their story moves from Paris to Vienna and on, taking in the birth of Japonisme in Paris (de Waal's great-great-grandfather, who acquired the collection, was also an early champion of the Impressionists) and the fall of the Hapsburg empire. The sources of de Waal's research include not only family documents but also glimpses through literature - as important social figures, his ancestors were inspiration for fictional characters from Proust to Joseph Roth.

They were also Jewish financiers, and so this is also a story of the sad history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-semitism, show more Dreyfus in his great-great-great grandfather's time, Nazism in his great grandfather's. It's a very personal, emotionally-charged viewpoint, as de Waal gradually discovers the history and imagines what it was like for his family.

He cannot go to his cafe, to his office, to his club, to his cousins. He has no cafe, no office, no club, no cousins. He cannot sit on a public bench any more: the benches in the park outside the Votivkirche have Juden verboten stencilled on them ... He cannot go on a train: Jews and those who look Jewish have been thrown off. He cannot go to the cinema. And he cannot go to the Opera. Even if he could, he would not hear music written by Jews, played by Jews or sung by Jews. No Mahler and no Mendelssohn. Opera has been Aryanised. There are SA men stationed at the end of the tram line in Neuwaldegg to prevent Jews strolling in the Vienna woods.

I had actually been expecting this book to be more about the netsuke themselves - I love netsuke, and de Waal, who is a potter (you can see some of his work here) writes fantastically well about the look and especially the tactility of the netsuke. But I couldn't be disappointed when the story turned out to be about something else - it was too good.

There are some lovely pictures of the netsuke here.

Sample: What was it like to have something so alien in your hands for the first time, to pick up a box or cup - or a netsuke - in a material that you had never encountered before and shift it around, finding its weight and balance, running a fingertip along the raised decoration of a stork in flight through clouds? show less

Six-word review: Family saga mirrors recent European history.

Extended review:

I've given a rare five-star rating to The Hare with Amber Eyes, a rich, engaging, moving narrative that is at once a family chronicle and a cultural and political history of our times.

Nonfiction works seldom get more than four stars from me because they rarely have the literary quality that places them in my top ranks. To rate five stars, a novel has to blow me away. This does not mean that I think it's flawless; in fact, it can have plain flaws and still earn a 5 or a 4½. But in addition to warranting superlatives in the basic elements of character, plot, setting, theme, and literary style, it has to show me an ineffable quality of artistry that sets it show more apart--an innate magnificence that can't be reduced to numbers or items on a checklist.

It's all but impossible for a work of nonfiction to do this, although there are always a few that seem remarkable enough to me to set and even exceed their own standards.

The Hare with Amber Eyes possesses that literary quality. I found it affecting, touching, emotionally laden, fraught, understated, poignant. It exhibits both a broad scope and a fine focus. The author speaks in deft, evocative, and occasionally lyrical prose, reflecting an artist's eye for proportion, relationship, composition, context, juxtaposition, and the power of a silent statement. The language evinces not only the author's intellectual confidence but also his confidence in the reader, who is presumed to be both educated and cultivated. A shared body of knowledge, an understanding of terminology, and a familiarity with certain names are taken for granted; if we're not quite up to the author's use of French or mention of known figures in the arts, we can quietly Google them while taking de Waal's presumptions as a compliment.

The structure of the book follows from the author's initial intent to recount the history of a family-owned collection of netsuke, small, delicately carved Japanese ornaments acquired during the 19th-century rage in Europe for all things Japanese. He explains the 1870s craze in part by the fact that its foreignness put enthusiasts on an equal footing: "For with Japanese art there was an exhilarating lack of connoisseurship, none of the enmeshed knowledge of art historians to confound your immediate responses, your intuitions." (page 49)

Organizing a personal narrative around a concrete object entailed not only reconstructing a history from family documents, photographs, and lore but executing a skillful blend of objective historical facts and an artist's imagination. Late in the narrative (page 342), De Waal writes: "I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things."

Indeed, the scale of these exquisite miniatures, of which the hare with amber eyes is one, invites close examination. Their smallness creates a feeling of intimacy that permeates the book. Somehow the author conveys a sense of speaking privately about private things rather than of addressing a global audience.

Yet the netsuke are not the central image of the book. The central image is the vitrine.

A vitrine is a glass display case (vitre: pane of glass), a cabinet that consists of transparent windows and doors. Says de Waal (page 66): "But the vitrine--as opposed to the museum's case--is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric." The visual becomes tactile, and in that instant it also becomes personal.

The act of looking and actively seeing drives the book. In all forms, page after page, we have windows, glass, prospects, views, framing, panoramas, inventories, images, paintings, sculptures, art, photographs, perspectives. It is this sensory engagement of the reader that makes the reader not so much a consumer of words as a sharer of visions. Those visions, laden with the author's own memory and palpable ties to a lost way of life, seem almost to plant memories in the mind of the reader and draw out the same sense of pride and loss, rooted in whatever parallels have meaning to us.

In my estimation, the greatest shortcoming of this work is the lack of an index. I would have found it helpful at many points to be able to refer back to names, dates, and places to help me retain a sense of the manifold threads and connections that run through the narrative. I would also have welcomed many more photographs.

If you have read the book, you might also enjoy this talk given by the author at the Palace Ephrussi in Vienna where so much of the story takes place: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wqJINrGj0 show less

A magnificent family history of my favorite kind: big trends via individuals. Written so beautifully I assumed it was fiction for the first 50 pages. A serious achievement for anyone, nearly imcomprehensible as an amateur's first book. Bonus points for judaica, japonica, and Proust. Worth it for Anna

I am not sure what halted my reading progress, maybe that the book had moved into WWII and the beginning of the Holocaust in Vienna. But once through that section I raced along with fascination on the trail of the netsukes and the warm, intimate revelations of the author as he digs and probes the people and their houses, their travels and collections in the 19th and 20th Centuries. A Russian banking family from Odessa, they set up concerns in Vienna, Paris, London on a par with and sometimes jointly with the Rothschilds and continued to collect art. One uncle was a contemporary of Proust. Another had a fantastic library. Another gifted a palace, artwork and gardens on the Riviera to the French Académie des Beaux Arts. Highly show more recommended.

One of many favorite quotes:

“Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.” show less

This book with a profound emotional impact. The author, a potter and an artist, begins his narrative in a precise and refined vocabulary about art and art collecting and then goes into his family’s history.

De Waal’s father was a priest in the Church of England. His mother was a daughter of the Ephrussi family, who ran and owned banks in Paris, Rome, and Vienna. They were a very secular people, blending in with their fellow French, Italian, and Austro-Hungarian peers as members of the merchant class. They had come a long way from their great-grand parents who lived an impoverished rural life in the shtetl. They were cosmopolitans, and the Viennese Ephrussi were loyal Austrian citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It’s a tale of show more 19th century success, wealth and privilege in European capitals. The family were successful bankers. Because of their business acumen and because the Biblical prohibition against usury prohibited Christians from loaning money at interest to other Christians, just as it was unethical for Jews to loan to Jews. In 19th century Europe there were more Christians than Jews. As a result, the Bankers who were Jews had more customers, governments and firms that needed capital to invest.

Unfortunately for the Viennese Ephrussi, the Austro-Hungarian Empire shrunk to small, impoverished county after its defeat in the First World war. With the poverty that resulted from the terms of surrender, resentments against the rich by a majority Christian population fueled the fires of antisemitism. Then with the 1938 return of Austria’s most infamous son, Adolf Hitler, the Anschluss turned Austria into a part of the new German Empire. The Ephrussi were no longer citizens. They were Jews and their property, their art, their home and all its furnishings were confiscated. They were reduced to the choice of leaving or extermination. A few escaped to England, Mexico, and the United States. Those that remained died in concentration camps.

The author’s grandmother Elizabeth returned to Vienna after the war from England. Her former home was now American occupation forces. There she met and received from the family’s servant Anna, a gentile, the netsuke that Anna had smuggled out of the house in her apron and hid in her mattress, until she returned them to Elizabeth. These tiny Japanese sculptures were what remained of the family’s art collection. These tiny sculptures were the playthings of Elizabeth and her siblings. The rest of the collection had been confiscated by the Nazis and then resold to others after the war.

After Elizabeth returned to England she was visited in October 1947 by her brother Ignace, or Iggie as he was more commonly known. He was veteran of the American Army, a translator who conveyed to the officers of the German forces the terms of surrender. Now post war he was working for a grain exporting firm, which had offed him a choice of posting to either the Belgian Congo or Occupied Japan. After supper Elizabeth showed him the netsuke. This helped him decide on his next work assignment. “It’s Japan, he said. I’ll take them back.”

After he arrived, Iggie fell in love with Japan. He loved the language, the food, and the culture. He found a new job as a banker and found both success, and a partner, Jiro. They moved in together, and there Iggie spent the rest of his life.

Fifteen years after Iggie’s death in 1994, the author visited Jiro in Japan and was given the netsuke to take back to England. There they reside in an open display case, a vitrine, deaccessioned from the Victoria & Albert Museum and purchased by the author and his wife. He writes, “…I want our three kids to have a chance to get to know these netsuke as those children did a hundred years ago.” show less

This being the 78th review of The Hare here on LT, I am sure I cannot do it justice, but the sentence that has been rolling around in my mind goes like this: You know a book is special when even when you don't want to read any more of it you keep on reading..... Edmund de Waal inherits 264 netsuke, those charming, witty, sensual and intricately carved ornaments, once worn as part of a formal Japanese costume, up to the Meiji times when old-fashioned dress was discouraged - and not just any netsuke, but very good ones collected originally in the late 19th century by his great great uncle Charles when the fever of Japonisme caught on among the aesthetes and intellectuals with a bit (or a lot!) of spare cash, in Paris. The netsuke are show more among the few surviving treasures of a vast fortune, truly unimaginably vast, and it is through the medium of the netsuke that de Waal gingerly approaches the rise and fall of his father's maternal family, the Ephrussi bankers of Odessa, Vienna, Paris.... To tell this story, de Waal adopts a slightly distant style of writing, and surely he can write it no other way, for to get any closer would be too dangerous, too painful, for it is a story both breathtaking and terrible. While I've read widely about world war 2, I am constantly brought face-to-face with new angles on the perfidy (and I don't use that word lightly) of the Nazis. The image of a priceless Louis XVI desk being heaved over the railing into the courtyard below is as appalling as anything I've read. Of course, things are just things, but .... in this case the irony is knifelike, these brownshirt louts claim to be cleansing Austria of 'dirt' but too stupid to have any idea what they are destroying. de Waal manages to convey too, with utmost tact and humility, his amazement that he could have come from a family that rose to such wealth and privilege only to have it taken from them in a matter of days. And yet, here he and his brothers and cousins are, de Waal, makes clear, prospering and letting the past be what it is. And here are the netsuke, these exquisite, intimate objects, overlooked when the Nazis ransacked the house - rescued by Anna, the austrian servant, Anna of no last name, kept under her mattress and returned to de Waal's doughty grandmother after the war. What a symbol. What a powerful book and a necessary one to the memoir literature of that war. ****1/2 show less