The Hare with Amber Eyes

This book's theme was so unexpected. When I bought it at the library used bookstore, the clerk said it was one of her favorite books ever. I hadn’t paid attention to the back matter, rather, I was attracted by the title. The cover artwork might have alerted me, but I missed the connection. (And I won’t give it away here.)

I am always fascinated by the intersection of private lives and historic events. Discovering that this book was a multi-generational family memoir of one of the Ephrussis, one of the wealthiest Jewish banking dynasties in Paris and Vienna, I expected… show more.

Written by a prominent British ceramicist, this memoir is remarkable for its research and depth into the background of the writer’s forgotten Jewish heritage and five generations of his ancestors, the Ephrussis, who immigrated to Paris where, in the Nineteenth Century, they built a banking dynasty from Vienna to Paris.

After inheriting a collection of 264 netsuke—Japanese wood and ivory carvings—de Waal starts digging into the past to uncover the mystery behind the netsuke and why they survived when most of the family perished at the hands of the Nazis.

This is another WWII story that illuminates the tragic events… show more.

De Waal has the art of transporting you to another era, painting treasures and palaces with his words.

It’s the story of the Ephrussi family, their loves and lives and travels, and most importantly, their art collections across a century and continent from Odessa to Vienna to Paris.

You’ll read it and travel and dream. And it may even make you actually jump on a plane to Paris.

In this elegantly written quest, the premier British potter of his generation, Edmund de Waal, digs into the history of his secular Jewish family, attempting to fathom the path taken by the collection of Japanese netsuke (small carved figurines) he has inherited.

As he sifts through the family’s past, we learn about the fabulous wealth of the Ephrussis, who cornered the wheat market in Odessa, and the striking characters in the branches of the family who take up prominent positions in 19th-century Paris and Vienna. Carrying the symbolic weight of the family’s vast artistic and financial heritage, the… show more.

I only just learned about this book, and I am currently deep in it. It is a magical story about history and family through the lens of trying to piece together the story of a collection of objects. In fairy tales, objects carry enchantments, and de Waal nods to that tradition. This memoir is part detective story, part history tour, and fully a beautiful memoir filled with its own magic. 

Carved from wood or ivory, Japanese Netsukes were created by both great craftsmen and gifted amateurs. A Netsuke served a single purpose: as the toggle on a cord for a cloth container holding medicine or tobacco. I’m drawn to this book because its author, Edmund de Waal, enlists his ancestor’s collection of Netsuke to combine several genres brilliantly well. It is, at once, a family memoir, travel literature, and essays of migration and exile. I agree with his belief that "objects have always been... stolen, retrieved and lost. It is how you tell their stories that matters."

You’d never expect such a literary triumph from the pen of a ceramicist (and academic in possession of not one, but five honorary doctorates), and yet: I dare anyone to read this book and remain unconvinced of its lyrical brilliance. It is a gripping, searching family—and world—history traced and told through actuality and artifact. You’ll learn all you never knew about netsuke, as well as a few things about (literary) craft. 

This is a marvelously written history of the rise and fall of a most influential European family. The book is also rather timely, because it starts in Odessa of today's Ukraine, and with trading wheat, from what is still today the single biggest supplier of wheat. I love this book for its interweaving stories of everyday life with grand developments during the pre-wars' rise of Europe's wealth, both economically and intellectually – and its moral collapse. For years, I mentioned this as a must-read book to friends.