Waterstones The Hare With Amber Eyes

Author: Ralph Blumenau

Rating: 5

Review: Edmund de Waal is a distinguished ceramicist, who has inherited a collection of 264 exquisite netsuke, tiny Japanese carvings, from Ignace Ephrussi, a great-uncle who was born in Vienna; Ignace in turn had inherited it from his father Viktor; and Viktor had been given it as a wedding present by his cousin Charles, who was then living in Paris. The netsuke become the thread on which de Waal strings the story of his research into the history of the lives and times of the French and the Austrian branches of the Ephrussi. He evokes this history with great scholarship, and with personal and aesthetic empathy and sensitivity. The patriarch of that Jewish family had made a fortune in Odessa by exporting wheat. He had then branched into banking, had sent one of his sons to Vienna in 1857 and another to Paris in 1871, to open branches of the bank there. The collection had been started by Charles. Though not a banker - his elder brother ran the bank - he was immensely rich and already in his early twenties played a big part in the Paris art world as a collector and art journalist in the 1870s, and he would become a patron and friend of the Impressionists (though, to their disgust, also of Moreau and Baudry, with their vulgar opulence). De Waal richly describes the world in which he moved. His access to the upper échelons of society exasperated the antisemitic art lover De Goncourt. The Ephrussi family would also be one of the regular targets of Drumont's Jew-hating periodical `La France Juive'; and when the Dreyfus affaire exploded, many of the doors that had been open to the family were now closed to them. Degas and Renoir were among those who now broke off their contacts with Charles. In the 1870s the fashion for Japonaiserie had just started: Japanese prints, lacquer boxes - and netsuke. Charles loved the tactile quality of the latter two, and this particularly appeals to De Waal, whose own art depends so much on satisfying the sense of touch. And Charles bought the entire collection of netsuke in one go from Sichel, the main dealer in Japonaiserie at the time, and he had a vitrine made in which to display them. But by the 1890s the fashion for things Japanese faded and was even becoming ridiculed. Charles' taste changed along with that of the artistic world: as he moved to an even larger house, he now bought Rococo and Empire art and furniture. And that will perhaps have made it less of a wrench for him to give his collection of netsuke to his cousin Viktor as a wedding present in 1899. And De Waal now follows it to the Viennese Ephrussis. Again he describes the background: their great palais on the newly-built Ringstrasse; an exploding Jewish population, with fabulously wealthy bankers on top (Viktor, a Baron of the Habsburg Empire and De Waal's great-great-grandfather among them), and, without it immediately touching them, an antisemitism even more florid and rowdy than in France. De Waal evokes the members of the family, their social lives, their liaisons and their holidays, their clothes and their furniture. He describes how even the rich suffered from food shortages during the First World War. The next generation leave the nest: De Waal's grandmother Elisabeth, a lawyer, a poet and a friend of Rilke's, married a Dutchman and they lived first in Paris, then in Switzerland, and then in England; her sister married a Spanish Jewish banker and moved to Madrid and then, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, to Mexico; their brother Ignace became a fashion designer in New York. He took American citizenship and enlisted in the American Army after Pearl Harbour. In Vienna Viktor and Emmy had to face the horrific events of the Anschluss: that day the mobs swarmed into the Palais Ephrussi in an orgy of destruction. Then followed a more methodical search and confiscation. The long-serving family servant, Anna, had to help pack up the things the Nazis were taking away - but, unnoticed, she secreted the netsuke, hid them in her mattress, and, after the war, returned them to Elisabeth. Viktor (aged 78) was arrested for three days, and gained his release by signing away al his property; he and Emmy may then live in just two rooms of the Palais. The main floor became the office of Alfred Rosenberg. Elisabeth, now a Dutch national, returned to Vienna to handle the bureaucracy and the bribery needed to get permission for her parents to emigrate; and they crossed the border into Slovakia to the estate at Kövecses, Emmy's original home. And as Slovakia, too, was likely to be absorbed into the Reich, Elisabeth once again managed, just in time, to secure for Viktor (Emmy having died five months earlier) a visa to come to England. He died in Tunbridge Wells in 1945. Abruptly De Waal moves us to desperate and seedy Tokyo under American occupation. Here Ignace, demobilized and now working for an international grain exporting business (shades of the family's origin!), arrived in 1947. He brought with him the netsuke, which his sister Elisabeth had passed on to him: perhaps it had seemed appropriate to her that the netsuke should go home. And Ignace came to love Japan: he lived there for the remaining 47 years of his life, learnt to speak fluent Japanese, collected more Japanese works of art, and adopted Jiro, his young Japanese companion, as his son. De Waal visited them several times. After Ignace died, Jiro told De Waal that once Jiro had gone, he should look after the netsuke. There is a slight mystery here: De Waal has the netsuke now, though, according to the family tree at the front of the book, Jiro, in his mid-eighties, was still alive when this beautifully crafted book was written.

Author: P. G. Harris

Rating: 3

Review: The Hare with Amber Eyes is a family history. The family in question is that of author Edmund De Waal's paternal grandmother, Elisabeth Ephrussi. It follows them from being successful wheat merchants in Russia in the early 19th century, through being fabulously wealthy bankers in fin de siècle Paris and Vienna, to a diaspora in the 1930s. While De Waal himself is currently a member of the penultimate generation of the family, his primary tale reaches its conclusion with his great uncle Iggie in post Second World War Japan. De Waal ties the family's history together with a set of 264 netsuke, ornamental toggles for attaching bags to a belt, carved in wood or ivory. One of these is a hare with amber eyes. Crucial to the family's story is their Jewishness, and it is in telling the story of the Jewish experience in the 19th and 20th century that the book is at its strongest. This is a book which repeats one of history's clearest lessons. The language used to abuse Jews in 19th century Paris is so obviously echoed by the populist xenophobes of 21st century, that the danger they present is inescapable. We don't need to imagine where their views might lead. We've seen it. We saw it in Dachau, Srebrenica, and Rwanda. The horror of the Jewish story has been documented many times, but De Waal brings it once more to raw and painful life by relating the personal impact on his own family. The second way in which De Waal is successful is in writing a well structured story. This is a tale in three parts, with the optimistic first movement telling the story of the family's rise, but with the growing threat in the background. In the second an idyllic opening gives way to the breaking storm. The third act is a soothing conclusion. While it did take me some time to tune in to the book, by the end I found myself wanting to make time for it, drawn in by the unfolding narrative. So far so good. However, I may be something of a Roundhead, but this felt to me as almost a pastiche of a book written by a privately educated arts graduate. The near self consciously elaborate prose constantly begs the question, "Beautifully written or pretentiously disappearing up its own fundament?". It is writing which finds too much meaning in inconsequential detail. "They can certainly be thought of as ornamental, even as a sort of enchantment.I wonder about the appropriateness of Charles' wedding present once it reaches Vienna". Seemingly beautiful sentences whose gilding hides an absence of meaning. I would describe the style as Baroque, using the word in a perjorative sense. One might admire a well crafted phrase or sentence, but viewed as a whole it is over elaborately ornate. There is a definite tendency, at its strongest in the early chapters, for De Waal to exercise his vocabulary in an intrusive way, sending this reader to the dictionary more frequently than I would've liked. Oh, and to save others looking it up, "flaneurial" means "at a strolling pace". This is also an intensely materialistic book. At times it feels like a catalogue of obscene opulence with De Waal resorting to simply registering the possessions of his ancestors. Like a visit to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire one can appreciate the beauty at first, but after a while it simply becomes wealth without taste. As Clement Freud once filled time on Just a Minute with endless listing, so De Waal fills the page with his forbears' objets d'art. At one point I almost got the impression that the author viewed the loss of life in the holocaust as less of an issue than the loss of material wealth. Certainly the former is covered in a more perfunctory fashion than the latter. Perhaps I am being unkind when I describe De Waal as a dreadful name dropper. Maybe he is merely faithfully reporting the circles in which his family, particularly his several times removed uncle Charles, lived, but it does have a flavour of "oh yes, my family knew Monet, Renoir, Proust, Freud &c". The obsession with possessions and historical celebrity felt like a missed opportunity. there were people, members of the family, about whom I wanted to know more. His grandmother Elisabeth, who escaped the constraints of a patriarchal society to become an academic and lawyer would have been a much better subject than the dully acquisitive Charles. Her parents Viktor and Emmy and their complex marriage are characters Would have held more interest than another listing of fine furniture and paintings. Finally, I can't leave the book without commenting on the title which seems symptomatic of much of the writing in its empty symbolism. It is a title chosen to create an interesting title, it says little about the book to which it is attached. The netsuke are only peripheral to the tale, and within the netsuke, the hare barely features. If he had wanted to use one of the netsuke as a title, he would've been more honest to call the book The Medlar, or The Tiger. Three stars could be a little lacking in generosity for an intelligent book which eventually drew me in, but I had too many problems with both style and content to award more.