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The Hare with Amber Eyes
A Hidden Inheritance
Edmund de Waal traces the history of the Ephrussis, a prosperous European Jewish banking family, by following an inherited collection of 264 Japanese netsuke—small carvings originally used as toggles with traditional clothing. The collection passes from the art-filled world of Charles Ephrussi in late nineteenth-century Paris to the family palace in Vienna, survives Nazi seizure after the 1938 Anschluss, and eventually travels with Ignace “Iggie” Ephrussi to postwar Tokyo. De Waal combines family memoir, cultural history, art history, travel, and archival investigation to ask what objects can preserve when wealth, homes, status, and lives are violently dispersed. The carvings do not provide a simple recovery of the past; instead, their survival exposes both the durability and the limitations of material memory. Through their changing settings and owners, the book turns one inheritance into a closely observed account of collecting, antisemitism, dispossession, migration, and remembranc…