Book review: The Hare With the Amber Eyes

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal... the story of his family, the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centred in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, and peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussis lost almost everything in 1938 when the Nazis confiscated their property, and were unable to recover most of their property after the war, including priceless artwork; an easily hidden collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures was saved, tucked away inside a mattress by Anna, a loyal maid at Palais Ephrussi in Vienna during the war years. The collection has been passed down through five generations of the Ephrussi family, providing a common thread for the story of its fortunes from 1871 to 2009. Says wiki, largely accurately.

I read this in Vienna, sort-of at Mfd's instigation, though M passed it to me. That is a good place to read it, because - whilst quite a bit of the book concerns Paris¹ - the main interest is Vienna, and the horrible events of the Anschluss. EdW is a terribly cultured person, and his book is terribly cultured too, but somehow lacking. Spread too thin perhaps. In a way, he has nothing to say. He fingers his netsuke, speculates on what others might once have thought of them, and puts them back in their vitrine. I'm being unkind and perhaps unfair; but nonetheless - having visited rather a lot of paintings in my days in Vienna - the analogy that comes to mind is of the hyper-refined modern artist or connoisseur who can no longer appreciate the old masters and instead hangs only white circles on white backgrounds, or somesuch.

I said that wiki's description is "largely accurate" and the qualifier is because whilst they were finally ruined in 1938, the family lost greatly in WWI, and seems - from what I recall of what the book says - to have mostly lost its influential banking role either then or between the wars. Viktor seems to have little business accumen and I think the family was living off past glories, the bank rescued by others. Certainly they didn't have the finely-tuned political connections that top-level banking requires in my mind, nor the ability to take decisive action.

Notes

1. Some of the stuff about Charles being in Proust's circle is nice.