The Hare with Amber Eyes Exhibit

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal is billed as a memoir. Although it is indeed that, the label feels inadequate, not broad enough to get its arms around this book. The framework of the book is the author’s story of tracking down the history of an inheritance he knows little about, a vitrine of netsuke given to him by his Uncle Ignace Ephrussi. (For the interested, netsuke are miniature Japanese sculptures and a vitrine is a glass display case to hold such pieces.) Embedded in the netsuke’s story is the fate of a Jewish banking family in 19th and 20th century Europe. Within that trajectory, the book informs on various topics, including history, collecting, stolen and looted art, and the Jewish diaspora. The story is, sadly, not new or unusual, but the details sting nonetheless.

The Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York City currently houses an exhibit that shares a name with de Waal’s book. The exhibit includes the netsuke in question, as well as various pieces of art, books, and other ephemera collected by de Waal’s ancestors, the Ephrussi family. The exhibit is based on the book, yes, but more than that it evokes the book, through its hint of a domestic setting in which the pieces are displayed.

I visited the exhibit last week and found it rather eerie and unsettling. I suppose my discomfort stemmed from the background story, one of Nazis, sadness, and the rapid unraveling of a family, not just its wealth, but its religion, its soul, and its place in the world. Knowing how much de Waal’s ancestors treasured these objects, how much time and effort was spent on collecting and caring for them, only to have it all dissipate at the whim of a madman, made me feel like I shouldn’t be looking at them in a public institution, in glass cases. This is not a museum exhibit, but rather a living collection that should be in someone’s home, observed during a social call or holiday gathering, not surrounded by tourists, security guards, and winter coats.

De Waal’s great-grandfather, Viktor von Ephrussi, was an avid book collector. The passages in the book about his collection being taken by the Nazis were, to this bibliophile, heartbreaking. The exhibit includes a volume from Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” Viktor von Ephrussi’s cousin, Charles Ephrussi, served as an inspiration for Charles Swann in those books, and the copy in the exhibit belonged to Viktor. One can infer from the stories of Viktor that it would have brought him great pain to know that his books were separated, dispersed who knows where, and that a few of them ended up in a museum, thousands of miles from his beloved study. I found myself wishing I could trace the books’ trajectory, as was done for the netsuke, while wishing de Waal’s book was a novel, not a memoir recounting an all too familiar story.