The Hare with Amber Eyes

I did not expect to like this book. My grandmother, like innumerable North American Jewish grandmothers, recommends books to me and the rest of the family ceaselessly, especially books about Jewish history (or fictionalized history). But frankly I rarely like her recommendations; often I sense that they're going to be sort of saccharine, shallow treatments. (Whether this is fair of me is another thing entirely.) This book, I'm happy to say, was none of those things.

This is a complex story by an author who is deeply ambivalent about his family's history, especially the Jewish part of his family. I, being the descendent of poor and classless Ostjüden from Galicia and even further east, can't relate to the tale of vast intergenerational wealth and the great Jewish families of France and Germany. And in part because those stories have nothing to do with my personal family history, I've had little interest in hearing them, little interest in learning about the fabulously wealthy and privileged few whose hypervisible lifestyles provided (and, sadly, continue to provide) ample ammunition for antisemites. But this book made me understand why someone might care.

This is not a story about objets d'art. It's not even really necessary for the reader to have an interest in the history of Western fine art, or in Japanese traditional crafts and fine art. But the use of art as a framework for exploring the lives of de Waal's ancestors, and the netsuke as a sort of personified motif, work beautifully as entry points into what is really a story about relating to something much bigger, much older, and much more complex than you, and something to which you had not managed to give much thought prior to the entrance of 264 tiny plot devices.

It's simultaneously a bit disappointing, deeply moving, and totally inevitable that the book effectively finds its climax in the Shoah (Holocaust). It's difficult for anyone writing after 1947 to see the events of the 20th century prior to WWII as anything but a prelude to it, especially for Jews and even more so for Jews whose family history is in Europe. So the story of a Great Family, undone by a hopeless faith in assimilation, by antisemitism, and by war, is nothing new. But I was moved nonetheless, by de Waal's prickly ambivalence over the ostentatiousness of the lives of wealth lived by his ancestors (how very un-English! how stereotypically Jewish!) which melted into a deep empathy for and identification with Charles Efrussi, the Parisian art obsessive, via the albatross of his (de Waal's) inheritance.

Anyway, before this gets any more longwinded and pretentious, I'll end this by saying that I couldn't care less about the trials and tribulations of the scions of the wealthy Jewish families of Mitteleuropa in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But this book humanized this family, and gave me an insight into what this period looked like from the perspective of that proverbial Other Half, and why that matters. The simple fact that assimilation ultimately makes no difference when the chips are down was lesson enough, but the beauty of this story is that it was so much more than that. It gave voice to a part of history that's totally gone, present now only in archives and libraries full of the meticulous detritus of the Nazi regime, and through the stories related by those few descendants who care about not only the material remnants of that past, but by how the erstwhile owners of those remnants felt.

Almost gave up on this. The first half was just a gushing love letter to Charles Ephrussi, a fabulously wealthy ‘spare son' of a banking dynasty with seemingly nothing to do but socialise and provide a source of name-dropping to a future biographer. He knew Renoir! And the Empress! Proust references him! Thrilling stuff.

The recounting of the netsuke's story begins badly too. A brief acknowledgement that they're actually pillaged from Japan and then they take on their own lives - as a conglomerate whole bought en-masse by Charles because Japan was ‘in', and then seemingly left in a vitrine (get used to that word) as a piece of decoration. Eugh.

When they arrive as a wedding gift in Vienna things get a little more interesting, though the fact that Viktor (39) “waited until she was 17 and then proposed [to a girl he'd known since her childhood]” is not so much glossed over as outright ignored. However, the story of what happens in Vienna with the continued rise of antisemitism culminating in the annexation of Austria by the nazis, is interesting and eye-opening. The injustice of the forfeiture of the family fortune and assets is raw and real.

After the Vienna chapter there's a little wrapping-up of the netsuke's return to the family, which is sweet but I felt Anna should have been the real star of the book, her story seemed much more interesting, a life of servitude leading up to one quiet, brave, act of resistance and loyalty. But she only gets a single, apologetic, chapter in which the author admits he doesn't really know anything about her. If only he'd pursued her history with the same zeal as he followed up the whereabouts of every painting Charles ever touched.

The netsuke's return to Japan, I feel, is a return in name only. Yes they are in the country, no they are not returned to the country. The author strongly feels that objects are bought and sold and this is how things are. I think the people who snapped up the Ephrussi's belongings when the Nazis forced them to sell probably feel the same way.