The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

The family in book were originally from Odessa and were migrants in Vienna and Paris and as such never quite were completely assimilated - little things kept them different and still tied to Odessa. The subplot of the book is one of belonging or rather not belonging or fitting in. I was recommended to read this book and was reluctant to do so as I knew that as the history of a jewish family in Europe it would, at some point, lead to the Holocaust (its a period of history that I find too distressing and as I have a heart condition its probably best I don't go there) but the nature of the story intrigued me - tracing the family history thru the possession of a set of Japanese carvings is not a usual means of telling a family's history. This audio edition also features an interview with Edmund De Waal from the Vintage Books podcast. And, in prose as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a unique collection which passed from hand to hand - and which, in a twist of fate, found its way home to Japan. He traces the network of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. In this stunningly original memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the huge Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the ‘Jewish Question��), one piece at a time, in the pocket of a loyal maid – and hidden in a straw mattress. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion. Later, three children - including a young Ignace - would play with the netsuke as history reverberated around them.

Charles’s passion was collecting the netsuke, bought when Japanese objects were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna. Marcel Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Later, when Edmund inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined.… A total of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his Great Uncle Iggie. Winner of the 2010 COSTA Biography Award.

The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal