The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

The Ephrussi family, once grain magnates of Odessa, ascended to become a banking dynasty rivaling the Rothschilds in nineteenth-century Europe. Edmund de Waal, a renowned ceramicist and descendant, inherits a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke—minute, exquisitely carved figures of wood and ivory. This inheritance launches him on a quest to reconstruct his family’s vanished world through the journey of these small, tactile objects. In Paris of the 1870s, the aesthete Charles Ephrussi, an early patron of the Impressionists and a model for Proust’s Swann, acquires the netsuke at the height of the Japonisme craze. He lives a life of scholarly passion and salon culture, his taste shaping and being shaped by the artistic ferment around him. The collection is later sent to Vienna as a wedding gift for his cousin Viktor and Viktor’s wife, the glamorous Baroness Emmy. There, the netsuke reside in a vitrine in her dressing room, handled by their children during the elaborate rituals of her toilette. The narrative follows the family’s zenith in the opulent Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse, through the destabilizing aftermath of the First World War, and into the gathering storm of the 1930s. De Waal meticulously documents their cultivated, assimilated existence, which masked an underlying vulnerability. The book’s central, harrowing pivot is the Anschluss of 1938, when the Nazis systematically loot the family of everything—their bank, their palace, their library, and their art—reducing them to refugees in an instant. This is ultimately a meditation on memory, touch, and what endures. The netsuke, smuggled to safety by a loyal maid and hidden in a straw mattress, become the sole physical thread connecting de Waal to this obliterated past. His research becomes a form of pilgrimage, visiting empty spaces and archives to rebuild a story of extraordinary elegance and catastrophic loss, exploring how objects bear witness to the lives that cherished them.