Edmund de Waal appeared on the literary landscape a decade ago with the publication of his curiously titled first book, The Hare with Amber Eyes. By w

Things Left Behind by Charles Trueheart, The American Scholar

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2021-05-20 04:59:12

Edmund de Waal appeared on the literary landscape a decade ago with the publication of his curiously titled first book, The Hare with Amber Eyes. By word of mouth, this elegant investigative memoir found an audience of readers bewitched by its limpid, quirky prose and the unexpected turns of the European family saga it discloses so artfully.

The amber-eyed creature in the title is a tiny Japanese ivory figurine, known as netsuke whether singular or plural. De Waal’s wealthy French ancestor, art collector Charles Ephrussi, bought the hare and 263 other netsuke and lodged them in a vitrine in his Paris mansion. The figurines then migrated as a wedding gift to cousins in Vienna, whose lives were upended by the Nazis in the late 1930s, and then to safety in the hands of another descendant in Tokyo, where the indefatigable de Waal finds them intact. The book’s subtitle is A Hidden Inheritance.

The netsuke’s pilgrimage is an ingenious way to pull the reader through the tumultuous odyssey of its owners. The Hare is the story, at heart, of highly assimilated Jews making their distinctive mark on French culture and society—and then the story of how their perfect assimilation ultimately didn’t count. Only their Jewish heritage did.

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