The Hare With Amber Eyes

In The Hare with Amber Eyes, vitrines (lockable glass display cases) are recurring symbols of both containment and release, highlighting how society views both people and their possessions. Throughout the memoir, the vitrines’ dual nature as protective enclosures and transparent boundaries reflects the tension between the desire to preserve art and the impulse to interact with it. In addition, the display cases become a metaphor for the cultural visibility of the Ephrussi family as their Jewish heritage places them under increasing threat from antisemitic forces.

In late 19th-century Paris, Charles Ephrussi’s vitrine curated the netsuke and displayed them, creating anticipation before he permitted his guests to handle the tactile objects. The seductive nature of this ritual echoed the role of the vitrine’s contents in Charles’s affair with Louise Cahen d’Anvers. The vitrine thus symbolized the tension between social performance and intimacy.

In Vienna, the symbolism of the vitrine became more deeply tied to the family’s experience of assimilation and vulnerability. De Waal emphasizes how, in the grand Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse, the von Ephrussis were on constant display. The author metaphorically likens the Palais, with its glass-domed courtyard, to a vitrine, highlighting how it provided both protection from and exposure to the outside world. By contrast, the family kept the netsuke hidden away in the vitrine in Emmy’s private dressing room, escaping this public scrutiny. The Nazi looting of the Palais Ephrussi further transformed the vitrine into a symbol of entrapment and violation. De Waal’s observation that “[u]nder the grey-glassed roof, the whole house is like a vitrine that you cannot escape” (186) underscores its inhabitants’ vulnerability. The author emphasizes that the netsuke survive this plundering precisely because they are not on public display.

By culminating with a description of the unlocked vitrine in de Waal’s London home, the memoir ends on a note of hope and restoration. The vitrine, bought from the Victoria & Albert Museum, signals that the author takes his responsibility as the new curator of the netsuke seriously. However, by leaving the case open for his children to handle the Japanese carvings, he achieves a balance between preservation and active engagement with the artifacts in his care.

Vienna’s grand boulevard, the Ringstrasse, was conceived in the late 19th century as a monument to the city’s European modernity. Built on the site of the old city walls, it symbolized the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s ideals of progress, enlightenment, and cultural assimilation. The street became unofficially known as “Zionstrasse” as newly prosperous Jewish banking families settled there in “an architectural parade of self-confident wealth” (138). The construction of the Palais Ephrussi along this boulevard was therefore an architectural and ideological statement by the Ephrussi family, signaling their wealth and establishing their place within Viennese high society.

When de Waal visits Vienna, the Ringstrasse’s surface of grandeur makes him uneasy. Its opulence hints at assimilation as performance, illustrating how Jewish families built these palaces to mirror aristocratic taste. Nevertheless, they remained outsiders, unprotected from the mass antisemitism that erupted in the 20th century.

Through Viktor and Emmy’s perspectives from the Palais Ephrussi, de Waal portrays the Ringstrasse as a stage on which the horrors of European history unfolded. During the Anschluss of 1938, the street that once represented Vienna’s liberal enlightenment became the route of Nazi processions and plunder. As the Palais Ephrussi and neighboring properties were looted and their owners dispossessed, the Ringstrasse witnessed the erasure of the very families who helped build its prosperity. For de Waal, the boulevard is a reminder that civilization, however elegant its architecture, is built on fragile foundations.