The Hare With Amber Eyes

“I realise how much I care about how this hard-and-soft, losable object has survived. I need to find a way of unravelling its story. Owning this netsuke—inheriting them all—means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie.”

De Waal confronts the emotional and ethical weight of inheritance, presenting the netsuke as symbols of his family’s history and survival. His impulse to piece together a fragmented family past suggests that ownership entails an obligation to memory and truth. The author’s admission of feeling “unclear and discomfited” conveys the magnitude of his task.

“All this matters because my job is to make things. How objects get handled, used, and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question. I have made many, many thousands of pots. I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots. I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume. I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence. If it has warmth.”

By declaring that “how objects get handled, used and handed on” is his central concern, de Waal links his identity as a potter to his role as his family’s storyteller and historian. His skill for recalling the physical qualities of objects and their tactility (weight, balance, surface, and warmth) illustrates a perspective that intertwines materiality and memory.

“I walk past a couple of times and, on the third, notice there is the double back-to-back E of the Ephrussi family incorporated into the metal grilles over the street windows, the tendrils of the letter reaching into the spaces of the oval. It is barely there.”

De Waal’s discovery of the faint Ephrussi monogram on the Palais Ephrussi underscores his thematic exploration of Objects as Vessels of Memory and Continuity. He captures the tension between erasure and endurance, as the monogram is “barely there” and yet visible to those who look for it. This image is a metaphor for the challenging process of tracing his elusive family history. The almost vanished emblem also embodies how society suppressed and effaced Jewish identity, yet it ultimately survived.

“All these cousins can start a sentence in one language and finish it in another. They need these languages as the family travels to Odessa, to St. Petersburg, to Berlin and Frankfurt and Paris. They also need these languages as they are denominators of class. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home everywhere.”

This description of the Ephrussi children highlights language as both a tool of assimilation and a marker of identity for the cosmopolitan family. Their multilingual abilities mirror their social adaptability, allowing them to flourish within different cultures and European countries. However, this talent also emphasizes the need for cultural camouflage for them to be socially accepted.

“I want to find how these nonchalant Parisians, Charles and his lover, handled Japanese things. What was it like to have something so alien in your hands for the first time, to pick up a box or a cup—or a netsuke—in a material that you had never encountered before and shift it around, finding its weight and balance, running a fingertip along the raised decoration of a stork in flight through clouds?”

This passage illustrates how de Waal’s sensibility as a potter informs his approach to uncovering and relating his family history. The author’s desire to understand Charles Ephrussi and Louise’s initial reactions to Japanese art highlights his goal of exploring beyond mere facts to the emotions and sensory experiences of his ancestors.

“But the vitrine—as opposed to the museum’s case—is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.”

De Waal contrasts the distance created by viewing artwork in museum cases with the intimacy of the vitrine. He depicts the symbol of vitrines as a metaphor for desire and connection, given that viewing objects through glass is a prelude to touching them. By describing this encounter as “electric,” de Waal captures the charged sensuality of material experience, in which art comes alive through human contact.

“I find that I have fallen for Charles. He is a passionate scholar. He is well dressed and good at art history and dogged in research. What a great and unlikely trinity of attributes to have, I think, aspirationally.”

In this passage, de Waal’s admission that he has “fallen for” Charles Ephrussi reveals his growing intellectual and emotional identification with this ancestor. The description of Charles as both elegant and scholarly reflects the author’s admiration for his ancestor’s blend of aesthetic sensitivity and intellectual rigor, qualities he aspires to embody.

“It is a vivid image of covert power, of plotting. It has the intensity of Degas’s painting At the Bourse of a whispered conversation between hook-nosed, red-bearded financiers amongst the pillars. The Bourse and its players segue into the Temple and the money-changers.”

This passage exposes the antisemitic imagery and stereotypes prevalent in 19th-century France. By referencing Degas’s At the Bourse (a portrait of Jewish financiers at the Stock Exchange, de Waal illustrates how society perceived Jews as secretive, financially manipulative, and avaricious.

“Paris changed for Charles. He was a mondain with doors shut in his face, a patron ostracised by some of his artists.”

De Waal captures the sudden reversal of fortune that Charles Ephrussi experienced due to the rising tide of antisemitism in 19th-century France. The author uses paradoxical statements, depicting his ancestor as both a socialite and a pariah, a patron of the arts and an individual whom artists later shunned. These contradictory attributes emphasize how prejudice stripped Charles of his identity and purpose, thematically illustrating The Jewish Diaspora and the Fragility of Assimilation.

“I think it might have been at around this point that Viktor developed his nervous tic of taking off his pince-nez and wiping his hand across his face from brow to chin, a reflex movement. He was clearing his mind, or arranging his public face.”

This passage illustrates de Waal’s use of novelistic characterization techniques to bring his ancestors to life on the page. The author suggests that Viktor von Ephrussi’s habit of wiping his face developed in response to the psychological strain of maintaining composure under social and emotional pressure. His literal arrangement of his “public face” conveys the constant effort that cultural assimilation demands.

“The newly married couple, my great-grandparents, have a balcony view onto the Ringstrasse, a balcony view for the new century.”

De Waal positions Viktor and Emmy Ephrussi as figures of modernity and aspiration, their “balcony view” of the Ringstrasse symbolizing both privilege and participation in the grand spectacle of the new century. The repetition of “balcony view” emphasizes the couple’s elevated social and physical perspective, reflecting their status among Vienna’s cultural and economic elite. However, the phrase also foreshadows how, from this vantage point, they witnessed the arrival of the Nazi regime.

“Here, in this dressing-room, they are part of the intimacy of Emmy’s life. This is the space where she undresses with the help of Anna, and dresses for the next engagement with Viktor, a friend, a lover.”

This description of the netsuke in Emmy’s dressing room at the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna contrasts with their former role as objets d’art at the Hôtel Ephrussi in Paris. Seen only by Emmy, her children, and her maid, Anna, the Japanese carvings are no longer the focus of public admiration and artistic appreciation. However, the author suggests that the private, sensual rhythms of daily life in Emmy’s dressing room are the ideal space for the collection. The netsuke take on a new role, becoming witnesses to human intimacy and playthings for Emmy’s children.

“I look at a picture of Viktor with his neatly trimmed beard and realise that he looks like my father does now, and wonder how long I’ve got before I too start to look like this.”

In this passage, de Waal reflects on the continuity of family identity, recognizing how physical resemblance links generations across time. The resemblance between Viktor von Ephrussi and the author’s father reframes inheritance from property (the netsuke) to genetic legacy. De Waal’s reflective, uneasy tone as he anticipates his own future appearance conveys the uncanny intimacy created by inherited traits across generations.

“And someone turns out the lights in the library, as if being in the dark will make them invisible, but the noise reaches into the house, into the room, into their lungs. Someone is being beaten in the street below. What are they going to do? How long can you pretend this is not happening?”

In this description of antisemitic violence erupting on the streets of Vienna, the author’s use of the present tense collapses historical distance. This approach directly conveys the terror of the moment, transforming past events into immediate, lived experience. The sensory intensity of the description (darkness, sounds, breath) creates a visceral sense of the von Ephrussi family’s confinement and fear.

“The sound of things breaking is the reward for waiting so long […] This night is the story told by grandparents to grandchildren, the story of how one night the Jews will finally be held accountable for all they have done, for all they have robbed off the poor; of how the streets will be cleaned, how light will be shone into all the dark places. Because it is all about the pollution the Jews brought to the imperial city from their stinking hovels, the way they took what was ours.”

In this passage, de Waal presents the attack on Jewish property and people in Vienna from a deliberately anti-Jewish perspective. The references to cleaning the streets of pollution and shining a light into “dark places” expose the grotesque irony of antisemitic rhetoric, which perversely frames destruction and violence as purification and justice.

“Everything that has taken decades to come into this house, settling in drawers and chests and vitrines and trunks, wedding-presents and birthday-presents and souvenirs, is now being carried out again. This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.”

De Waal captures the violence of dispossession through this image of Nazi officers emptying the Palais Ephrussi. The transformation of a lifetime of accumulated belongings into mere “stuff” emphasizes the stripping of emotional value and meaning from the intimate textures of family life. The description of this moment as a “strange undoing” conveys the collapse of the Ephrussi family’s continuity and identity, demonstrating the impermanence of wealth and status in the face of political upheaval.

“So this is how it is to be done. It is clear that in the Ostmark, the eastern region of the Reich, objects are now to be handled with care. Every silver candlestick is to be weighed. Every fork and spoon is to be counted. Every vitrine is to be opened. The marks on the base of every porcelain figure will be noted. A scholarly question mark is to be appended to a description of an Old Master drawing; the dimensions of a picture will be measured correctly. And while this is going on, their erstwhile owners are having their ribs broken and teeth knocked out.”

De Waal juxtaposes the clinical precision of the Nazi regime’s cataloguing of looted art with the brutal violence inflicted on its owners. The repetition of verbs associated with meticulous care (“weighed,” “counted,” “measured”) creates a tone of bureaucratic order that chillingly contrasts with the chaos and cruelty of persecution. This tension highlights the inhumanity of a system that values objects over human lives.

“There is no longer a Palais Ephrussi and there is no longer an Ephrussi Bank in Vienna. The Ephrussi family has been cleansed from the city.”

In this passage, de Waal’s stark, declarative sentences convey the erasure of a once-influential family in Vienna through the theft of assets, disguised as legal bureaucracy. The verb “cleansed” exposes the euphemism of Nazi ideology, which framed extermination and dispossession as purification.

“With Anna sleeping on them, the netsuke are looked after with more respect than anyone has ever shown them. She has survived the hunger and the looting, and the fires and the Russian invasion.”

De Waal presents Anna, the maid, as embodying quiet heroism and moral endurance. She concealed the netsuke inside her mattress during the turbulent events of World War II. The contrast between Anna’s act of curation and the chaotic danger of her surroundings (“looting,” “fires,” “invasion”) elevates her actions to a gesture of resistance. The survival of the netsuke underscores the author’s exploration of Objects as Vessels of Memory and Continuity.

“The netsuke share their imagery with the Japanese scrolls and gilded screens across the room. They have something to talk with in this room, unlike Charles’s Moreaus and Renoirs, or Emmy’s silver and glass scent bottles on her dressing-table.”

This description of the netsuke in Iggie’s Tokyo home suggests that the Japanese carvings had finally found a sense of cultural harmony, surrounded by objects that shared their Eastern aesthetics and origin. The personification of the netsuke (“they have something to talk with”) suggests that objects, like people, seek belonging and understanding. By contrasting their new environment with their former European settings, de Waal emphasizes that, like the Ephrussi family itself, the netsuke adapted to and survived a series of cultural displacements.

“It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan.”

De Waal reflects on the instability of identity and the fluidity of belonging within a family that history repeatedly uprooted. The shifting nationalities of his Ephrussi relatives underscore their adaptability. However, the author also highlights the precarious nature of their assimilation, which never offered permanence.

“It is very small, and has been carved so that when you roll it in your hands, you feel the slippery tortoises struggling over one another, round and round and round. As I hold it, I know that this man did look at tortoises.”

The author’s reflections as he handles a netsuke carved by Tomokazu reveal how art can create a moment of shared perception across time. De Waal’s observation that “this man did look at tortoises” acknowledges the care and attention to detail that Tomokazu devoted to this carving. The quotation underscores the theme of Art and Collecting as Identity-Making Practices, as the craftsman and owner of the piece unite through the power of the object.

“The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go. I think of a library carefully sorted into boxes. I think of all those careful burnings by others, the systematic erasing of stories, the separations between people and their possessions, and then of people from their families and families from their neighbourhoods. And then from their country.”

In this passage, de Waal turns Elisabeth’s decision to burn her mother’s letters into a meditation on loss, memory, and historical erasure. His admission that he is “the wrong generation” to follow her example reveals a contemporary impulse to preserve and remember. For the author, recovering and recording the Ephrussi family’s history feels like a duty, as it allows him to reclaim and restore continuity to a past fractured by displacement, dispossession, and antisemitism.