The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

The book begins with Edmund de Waal’s inheritance of 264 netsuke from his great-uncle Ignace “Iggie” Ephrussi. Rather than treating the carvings as decorative antiques, de Waal investigates the hands, rooms, and historical pressures through which they passed. The result is both a family reconstruction and a study of how meaning accumulates around objects.

The family story reaches back to Odessa, where the Ephrussis built their wealth through grain and commerce before establishing banking interests across Europe. One branch moved into Vienna, while Charles Ephrussi made his life in Paris. Charles became a critic, collector, and patron embedded in the city’s artistic culture. His acquisition of Japanese netsuke belonged to the late nineteenth-century enthusiasm for Japanese art known as Japonisme. In his Paris study, the carvings signified taste, novelty, and participation in an international market that converted unfamiliar cultural objects into fashionable possessions.

Charles later gave the collection to his cousin Viktor von Ephrussi and Viktor’s wife, Emmy, in Vienna. Inside the Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse, the netsuke entered a different kind of life. Kept in Emmy’s dressing room, they became intimate household objects and playthings for the children. This change matters: de Waal repeatedly resists the idea that an object has one fixed significance. Display, handling, affection, and family ritual continually revise what a possession means.

The narrative darkens as antisemitism moves from social hostility into organized persecution. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, the Ephrussi family’s property was subjected to systematic confiscation. Their social position and wealth offered no protection against a regime determined to strip Jewish citizens of rights, possessions, and belonging. The netsuke survived because Anna, a servant in the Vienna household, hid the small carvings and later returned them to the family. Their survival is therefore inseparable from both the destruction surrounding them and one person’s sustained act of preservation.

After the war, the family was dispersed. The collection eventually passed to Iggie, who took it to Tokyo, returning the Japanese objects to Japan under circumstances wholly different from those of their nineteenth-century purchase. De Waal’s visits with Iggie connect family testimony to tactile experience: the carvings can be held, turned, and examined even when much of the surrounding world has vanished.

Yet the book does not present objects as complete containers of memory. The netsuke endure, but they cannot speak without interpretation, and they cannot substitute for people, homes, artworks, or lives that were lost. De Waal’s achievement lies in holding these truths together. Objects can carry traces across generations, but every attempt to read those traces remains selective, ethically charged, and incomplete.

• **Objects and memory:** The netsuke preserve physical continuity, but the book questions whether possessions truly contain memories or merely prompt people to construct them.

• **Touch, use, and display:** Meaning changes according to whether an object is exhibited, handled, played with, hidden, sold, inherited, or researched.

• **Jewish belonging and exclusion:** The Ephrussis’ wealth and cultural participation coexist with persistent antisemitism, demonstrating the fragility of social acceptance.

• **Collecting and cultural fashion:** Charles Ephrussi’s netsuke reflect Japonisme and raise questions about desire, taste, cultural translation, and the European art market.

• **Dispossession and survival:** The survival of a small collection is set against the confiscation of a family’s homes, art, wealth, rights, and security.

• **Diaspora and inheritance:** Movement between Odessa, Paris, Vienna, Britain, and Tokyo turns inheritance into a history of migration rather than stable possession.

• **The ethics of reconstruction:** De Waal weighs archival evidence, family testimony, physical places, and his own imaginative responses without claiming that the past can be fully recovered.

The Ephrussi story belongs to the emergence of wealthy Jewish commercial and banking families in nineteenth-century Europe and to the partial, precarious integration of Jewish elites into metropolitan society. Odessa’s growth as a Black Sea trading center supported the family’s early prosperity. Paris and Vienna then offered access to finance, cultural patronage, and social prominence, while also exposing the family to modern political antisemitism.

In Paris, Japonisme shaped collecting and artistic taste as Japanese works entered European markets after Japan’s mid-nineteenth-century opening to wider foreign trade. Charles Ephrussi’s activities also intersected with Impressionist art, the French critical establishment, and the society later represented in Marcel Proust’s fiction. The Dreyfus affair intensified the book’s account of French antisemitism.

Vienna’s Ringstrasse culture provides another setting of aspiration and vulnerability. The decisive rupture came with the Anschluss of March 1938, when Austria was incorporated into Nazi Germany. Anti-Jewish laws and coercive “Aryanization” enabled the seizure of Jewish property and businesses. The family’s dispersal after Nazi persecution and the Second World War places its private history within the wider histories of the Holocaust, exile, and unresolved restitution.

The book is well suited to readers of family memoir, microhistory, Jewish European history, material culture, art collecting, and literary nonfiction. It may particularly appeal to readers interested in how a small set of objects can provide an organizing lens for large historical changes. Museum visitors, collectors, artists, archivists, and students of provenance may find de Waal’s attention to touch and ownership especially rewarding.

Readers seeking a comprehensive institutional history of the Holocaust, a technical guide to netsuke, or a complete business history of the Ephrussi dynasty should regard it as a personal and selective account rather than a general survey. Its reflective pacing may also be less suitable for those who prefer event-driven narrative throughout.

The prose is accessible but often meditative, moving between archival reconstruction, family relationships, art description, travel, and reflection. A large cast spans several generations, and similar family names can require attention. The narrative also assumes some comfort with shifts in place and period rather than supplying a textbook-style historical framework at every turn.

Terms connected to netsuke, European society, finance, art collecting, and Jewish history appear in context and are generally understandable without specialist training. The greatest challenge is structural rather than linguistic: readers must track both the collection’s physical route and the branching Ephrussi family. A family tree, timeline, or occasional notes can help.

No formal preparation is necessary. It is useful to know that netsuke are small Japanese carvings originally made as toggles for cords attached to containers worn with traditional dress. Basic familiarity with Impressionism, Japonisme, the Dreyfus affair, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Anschluss, and Nazi expropriation will clarify many references.

Readers may also benefit from distinguishing provenance—the history of an object’s ownership and movement—from the broader cultural interpretation placed upon it. That distinction becomes central as the carvings change owners, countries, functions, and emotional meanings.

Choose this book for its unusual method of making material culture central to family history. De Waal does not use the netsuke as decorative symbols added to an otherwise conventional memoir; he follows their documented movement to uncover networks of art, money, domestic life, prejudice, seizure, rescue, and migration.

The book also offers a valuable bridge between intimate and public history. It shows how political catastrophe enters rooms, inventories, bank accounts, wardrobes, and inherited stories. Its attention to provenance encourages readers to look differently at museum objects and family possessions: not as isolated things, but as evidence shaped by makers, buyers, servants, children, thieves, custodians, and heirs.

A careful reader may leave with a sharper understanding of how objects gather meanings through use and movement rather than possessing a single timeless identity. The book also demonstrates how quickly cultural prestige and economic security can collapse when prejudice becomes state policy.

Readers may reconsider the adequacy of the word “survival.” The netsuke survive physically, but their endurance exists beside enormous human and cultural loss. The account therefore encourages a more critical approach to inheritance: ask not only what has reached the present, but what disappeared, who preserved what remained, and whose labor or testimony made remembrance possible.

The book further illustrates the value and limits of archival inquiry. Documents, buildings, photographs, and possessions can challenge family legend, yet reconstruction always contains gaps and choices.

The collection gives the narrative a clear and memorable organizing principle while allowing de Waal to move across generations and countries. His experience as a maker contributes unusually precise attention to scale, texture, handling, placement, and the physical presence of things.

The work is strongest when it connects domestic detail to historical power. Rooms and cabinets are not treated as refuges outside politics; they reveal status, intimacy, cultural aspiration, and eventual violation. De Waal also combines investigation with self-questioning, acknowledging the seductions of family grandeur and the difficulty of turning fragmentary evidence into narrative. The movement from Parisian collecting to Viennese dispossession and postwar Tokyo gives the book broad scope without abandoning its intimate center.

This is an authored family memoir, not a neutral or exhaustive history of the Ephrussis, European Jewry, the Holocaust, or Japanese decorative arts. De Waal follows the branches and episodes most relevant to the netsuke, leaving other family members and historical developments less fully explored.

The European acquisition of Japanese objects is discussed through the Ephrussi collection and the fashion for Japonisme, but readers seeking a sustained analysis of colonial power, dealers, Japanese makers, or the export market will need additional sources. Likewise, the account of Nazi persecution is centered on one exceptionally wealthy family and cannot represent the full diversity of Jewish experience.

Because the book depends on surviving archives, testimony, places, and objects, some individuals—especially household workers—remain less fully documented than prominent family members. Its polished reconstruction should therefore be read with awareness of archival inequality and narrative selectivity.

• **Edmund de Waal:** The author, an acclaimed ceramic artist and an Ephrussi descendant, investigates the collection he inherited and reflects on what his own practice teaches him about touch, making, and possession.

• **The Ephrussi family:** A Jewish commercial and banking dynasty whose movement from Odessa into Vienna and Paris frames the book’s history of prosperity, assimilation, antisemitism, and dispersal.

• **Charles Ephrussi:** A Paris-based art critic, collector, and patron who acquires the netsuke. His cultural world links the book to Impressionism, Japonisme, and Marcel Proust’s Paris.

• **Viktor von Ephrussi and Emmy von Ephrussi:** De Waal’s great-grandparents and the owners of the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna, where the collection becomes part of family and domestic life before Nazi expropriation.

• **Elisabeth Ephrussi:** De Waal’s grandmother, whose life and papers help connect the Viennese family world to later generations and exile.

• **Ignace “Iggie” Ephrussi:** De Waal’s great-uncle, who takes the collection to Tokyo after the war and eventually passes it to the author.

• **Anna:** A servant in the Vienna household who hides the netsuke during Nazi rule and returns them to the family, making their survival possible.

• **Netsuke:** Small Japanese toggles that developed into intricate carvings. Their shifting roles—as fashion, collection, toys, hidden objects, and inheritance—structure the narrative.

• **Japonisme:** The European enthusiasm for Japanese art and design that shaped Charles’s collecting and raises questions about fashion, cultural encounter, and commodification.

• **Odessa:** The Black Sea port associated with the origins of Ephrussi wealth and the family’s rise through grain trading and international commerce.

• **Paris:** The setting of Charles Ephrussi’s artistic and social life, and of tensions surrounding Jewish acceptance in fin-de-siècle France.

• **Vienna and the Palais Ephrussi:** The principal family home in which the netsuke are domesticated and from which the family’s property is later seized.

• **Tokyo:** Iggie’s postwar home and the place where de Waal first encounters the collection in a setting that reconnects the carvings with Japan.

• **The Dreyfus affair:** A political and legal crisis that exposed powerful currents of antisemitism in France and forms part of the atmosphere surrounding the Paris Ephrussis.

• **The Anschluss:** Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, after which Jewish Austrians faced intensified persecution, dispossession, and forced flight.

• **Aryanization:** The coerced transfer and seizure of Jewish businesses and property under Nazi rule, essential to understanding the destruction of the Ephrussis’ Viennese world.

• **Provenance:** The documented history of ownership and movement. In this book, provenance becomes a method for examining both objects and the people whose lives crossed them.

• Can an object carry memory, or does it merely stimulate stories created by later owners?

• How does meaning change when an object moves from use to display, from luxury to plaything, or from hidden survivor to inherited artifact?

• What did wealth and cultural participation offer European Jewish families, and why did neither guarantee belonging or safety?

• How should descendants write about ancestral privilege without romanticizing it?

• What can provenance reveal about desire, cultural fashion, violence, and displacement?

• How do archives preserve some people while leaving others at the edges of the record?

• Is physical survival an adequate measure when the world surrounding an object has been destroyed?

• What responsibilities accompany the possession of an inherited object with a traumatic history?

Begin by tracing the collection’s changing function in each principal setting: Charles’s Paris study, Emmy’s Vienna dressing room, concealment during Nazi rule, and Iggie’s Tokyo apartment. Discuss what each room permits the netsuke to mean.

Compare the book’s different forms of evidence. Note where de Waal relies on family testimony, correspondence, photographs, public records, buildings, artworks, and the objects themselves. Consider which sources feel most persuasive and where the narrative necessarily becomes interpretive.

Give special attention to Anna. Her action is central to the survival story, yet the surviving archive provides less access to her inner life than to the lives of wealthy family members. This imbalance can open a productive discussion about class, labor, and who becomes visible in family history.

Another useful approach is to compare collecting with inheriting. Charles chooses the netsuke within a fashionable art market; later owners receive them under entirely different conditions. Discuss whether moral responsibility changes when possession is chosen, transferred, stolen, rescued, or inherited.

Finally, place the title object alongside the collection as a whole. Consider why one carving becomes the emblem of 264 objects and of a history extending far beyond any single artifact.

1. Does de Waal persuade you that objects can embody memory? Why or why not?

2. How does his work as a ceramic artist shape the way he researches and describes the netsuke?

3. What changes when the carvings move from Charles’s collection into Emmy’s family life?

4. How does the book balance fascination with the Ephrussis’ wealth against criticism of privilege and social ambition?

5. What does the family’s experience reveal about the limits of assimilation in France and Austria?

6. How should readers interpret the survival of the netsuke in relation to the scale of what did not survive?

7. What does Anna’s role reveal about archival visibility, domestic labor, and historical agency?

8. Where does de Waal distinguish documented fact from inference, and where did you want a clearer boundary?

9. How does the collection’s return to Japan alter its cultural or emotional significance?

10. Is provenance presented primarily as historical evidence, moral inquiry, family story, or all three?

11. Which location—Odessa, Paris, Vienna, or Tokyo—most changes your understanding of the collection?

12. What obligations, if any, does an heir have toward objects marked by dispossession and survival?

The book’s identity and original UK edition were checked against the author’s official archive, publisher information, and contemporary bibliographic material. Edition titles vary by market: the original UK subtitle is *A Hidden Inheritance*, while the first American edition uses *A Family’s Century of Art and Loss*. The profile therefore identifies the first UK hardcover specifically rather than combining metadata from several editions. Interpretive sections synthesize the book’s documented scope and method; they should not be read as substitutes for comprehensive histories of the Holocaust, the Ephrussi banking enterprises, or netsuke.