Towards the end of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), de Waal muses: ‘I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is it still a book about small Japanese things.’ It is, of course, about all of these. The hare with amber eyes is one of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke whose history de Waal started out to write. But their story is a window into a much broader history not only of his family, but also of aspects of late nineteenth and twentieth century cultural and political life in Europe. I found the book enthralling.
De Waal sets himself an exacting task: to find out the relationship between the netsuke and the people whose hands it has been in, but in doing so to avoid the melancholy of nostalgia. ‘Melancholy, I think,’ he writes, ‘is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return’. When I started reading, I didn’t really know what a netsuke was, so of course I looked it up on Google. You can see some of de Waal’s amazing collection of them here. Being a very good potter himself, de Waal is well placed to appreciate the look and feel of these intricate little objects. You can see some of his work here. But he proves himself also a very good story teller and a very good historian.
The story he has to tell is compelling, a case of fact being more interesting than fiction. I might have thought some of it far fetched if I read it in a novel. (Shame on me.) De Waal is a descendent of the Ephrussi family, rich Jewish bankers who came originally from Odessa, and migrated, some to Vienna and others to Paris. The original owner of the netsuke is Charles Ephrussi, who lives in Paris in the late nineteenth century and is a patron of several Impressionist painters and a collector of their works. His netsuke collection is later given as a wedding present to a cousin in Vienna. De Waal does a great job of delineating the lives of this sophisticated and cosmopolitan family. But like all good story tellers, he lays the groundwork for what we all guess is to come, first with the Dreyfus case in Paris, and then with the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria. The story of the survival of the collection is extraordinary. I think the bravery of de Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth is also amazing.
The cultural history covered in the book encompasses the expansion of Paris under Haussmann during the Third Republic, the building of the Ringstrasse in Vienna and the rebuilding of war torn Tokyo post World War II. Clothes, architecture, furniture, paintings, literature – all are touched on and set in their historical context. Reading about Charles’s life in Paris and his interactions with painters such as Degas, Monet and Manet, and others whose work I didn’t know, made me want to see for myself. My e-book edition included a few illustrations, but I found Google an indispensible aid to reading. I suggest you look at some of the works mentioned, especially Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ (here) which actually shows Charles in the background. But this is also a history of cultural dispossession. De Waal outlines the only too successful attempts made after the Anschluss to dehumanise Jews. ‘This is because it is important to address the old affront of Jews not looking like Jews. The process of stripping away your respectability … is a way of returning everyone to the shtetl, stripping you back to your essential character – wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back.’ What price the Ephrussi family’s ‘lifetime gamble on assimilation’ into European high culture?
But this is essentially memoir, not history. De Waal is present in the text throughout. He worries about what he is writing: ‘I have the slightly clammy feeling of biography’, he says, ‘the sense of living on the edges of other people’s lives without their permission’. He is pleased to find that Charles is someone he can like. He agonises over telling what happened to his great grandfather and great grandmother. ‘How can I write about this time?’ He is reduced to tears when he sees their first names written over on their birth certificates with the first names given to all Jews in Vienna – Israel and Sara. But fascinating and moving as de Waal’s exploration of his family history is, we should always remember that it is not a history of Austrian or French Jews; this is a relatively privileged family, even when dispossessed. The link between being a collector and having great wealth is not one de Waal explores in depth.
Still, I really enjoyed this book.
What Book to Read? 
I really enjoyed it too. No, it’s not ” a history of Austrian or French Jews” but does that matter? This particular family of originally-Russian Jews has its own diversity, its members have their struggles with conforming to the banking tradition of the family – or merely spending the proceeds – and they make their own different progress through the societies they find themselves in. We don’t hear much about the fascinating Stefan, disinherited because he married one of his father’s mistresses, even though he returned to Odessa where Edmund de Waal’s search concludes; nor do we hear much about Rudolf, de Waal’s youngest great-uncle, except that he marries and has five children in New York. However, the focus on the wealthier family members is justified by their ownership of the netsuke whose history in their hands is the starting point of the story. Fascinating that we had to deduce – or google – to find out what netsuke are, and indeed it was well into the book before a vitrine was explained: what I’d call ‘a china cabinet’, but still the French sounds more alluring, and it does fit.
No, this is a gripping story of people’s desire and ability to assimilate, with all the tragedy which that assumes in the anti-Semitism of the late 19th and the 20th centuries. It is poignant that the search concludes where the family’s story began, in Odessa where their first assimilation took place – not without some heartlessness. It was in Odessa that the patriarch Chaim Joachim Efrussi of the rural shetl became Charles Joachim Ephrussi of the Ephrussi Bank, which the sons Ignace (formerly Isaak) and Leon )formerly Leib) then took to Vienna and Paris.