Born in Odessa in 1849 and raised in Vienna, Charles Ephrussi was the original purchaser of the netsuke. A patron of the arts in late 19th-century Paris, his charm, wealth, and refinement established him as an influential figure in the artistic circles of la belle époque (“the beautiful age”). He was an advocate of the Impressionists, the editor of La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and a friend to artists such as Manet and Renoir.

Through Charles’s profoundly personal aesthetic taste, de Waal explores the theme of Art and Collecting as Identity-Making Practices. In many ways, Charles represented the pinnacle of Jewish assimilation into European high culture. However, as the memoir shows, his Jewish heritage meant that he was never entirely secure. He remained, in the eyes of many, an interloper within France’s cultural institutions. The Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, when virulent antisemitism erupted in France, reveals how quickly tolerance can turn to hostility. Charles, like other assimilated Jews of his class, became vulnerable to the very forces he believed his education and culture could transcend. His story foreshadows the greater ruptures to come for the Ephrussi family, whose wealth and cosmopolitanism the Nazis later obliterated.

Described as “good-looking, […] with a neatly trimmed dark beard, which [had] a haze of red in particular lights” (37), Charles is one of the memoir’s most vividly drawn ancestors. De Waal admits to admiring Charles as he learns more about him through his research. Identifying with Charles’s passion for crafted objects, the author reclaims a family lineage that found expression in art.

Born in Russia in 1860, Viktor von Ephrussi was de Waal’s great-grandfather. Scholarly rather than business-minded. Viktor unexpectedly inherited the Vienna branch of the family’s fortune when his elder brother was disinherited. His marriage to Emmy Schey von Koromla, a member of a Viennese aristocratic family, further reinforced the family’s social ambition and assimilationist aspirations. In the lavish Palais Ephrussi on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Viktor was surrounded by cultural emblems of European cosmopolitanism. However, underpinning this lifestyle was an awareness of his Jewishness in a society that both admired and resented his success.

Unlike his cousin Charles, who gifted him the netsuke, Viktor had a distant relationship with the Japanese carvings. Instead of displaying them in his study or the public areas of the Palais, they were tucked away in his wife’s dressing room, where Emmy and the children handled them. De Waal notes that he can envision Viktor “opening a brown parcel of books from his dealer in Berlin with a silver paper knife at this library table” (193) but cannot see him “in Emmy’s dressing-room looking down into the vitrine, unlocking it and picking out a netsuke” (193). This observation reflects Viktor’s strained relationship with his much younger wife and his preference for historic scholarship over art.

Viktor’s faith in intellect and cultural refinement as tools of assimilation reflects the liberal optimism of the Habsburg era. However, his eagerness to display patriotism toward his chosen country led him to make disastrous financial investments. His belief in the permanence of Austrian civilization collapsed under the weight of antisemitism and war, and his later years were marked by loss, exile, and displacement. After fleeing to Czechoslovakia, he spent his final years in diminished circumstances in England with his daughter’s family. His burial, “far away from his father and grandfather in the Doric-pillared mausoleum in Vienna, built […] to house the dynastic Ephrussi clan forever” (315) underscores his tragic trajectory. De Waal depicts his great-grandfather with empathy, portraying him as a man whose faith in culture and decency was betrayed by the civilization he believed in most deeply.

De Waal’s great-uncle Iggie von Ephrussi was born in Vienna in 1906 and grew up in the opulent Palais Ephrussi, when his father, Viktor, was still the head of the Ephrussi banking dynasty. Although Iggie was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, he inherited his mother’s love of fashion due to the hours he spent in her dressing-room playing with the netsuke. As a young man, he broke free of the life set out for him as an Ephrussi. Fleeing to the US, he underwent “a sort of baptismal crossing from one life to another, a voyage in some way into himself” (268), becoming a fashion designer and embarking on his first love affair with a man. Unlike his father, who clung to the old order of Viennese culture and banking respectability, he embraced change and displacement as a form of liberation from the identity that defined the Ephrussis.

Iggie’s decision to settle in Japan after World War II, along with the netsuke, marked a full-circle return to the Japanese carvings’ origins. Living in Tokyo with his partner, Jiro, Iggie constructed a life that harmoniously blended East and West, continuity and renewal. Iggie’s relationship with Jiro further deepened his significance as a figure of chosen identity. Unable to have a traditional family, Iggie formally adopted Jiro, an act that highlights how belonging can be created as well as inherited. His authentic cosmopolitanism contrasted with the fragile assimilation that his ancestors briefly attained, making him the embodiment of diasporic resilience. Iggie’s stewardship of the netsuke ensured that his family’s story, once nearly obliterated, survived. De Waal’s inheritance of the netsuke from his great-uncle provides a crucial bridge between the Ephrussi family’s former European grandeur and the author’s modern sense of identity.