The Hare with the Amber Eyes

There is so much to say about this beguiling book by the potter, Edmund de Waal, that it is hard to know where to start other than it has taken me far too long to get around to reading it. When I mentioned it in January, Recommendations from the Costa, it was in the aftermath of the Costa biography award and it was in my mental filing cabinet as a biography of 264 netsuke (small Japanese carvings) and maybe that was a little off putting. In truth, though, it is a family memoir and the netsuke are the link to an exploration of several generations of the Ephrussi family. We follow the family from grain merchants in Odessa to wealthy bankers in Paris and Vienna; from Jewish assimilation to near obliteration; from escape from Austria to Tunbridge Wells of all places; from California to post-war Tokyo; from collectors, patrons and connoisseurs of art and literature in the late 1800s to Nazi ransacking and sequestering (and subsequent attempts at restitution after the war).

It is at once an art history book (just imagine being related to someone who was friends with Proust, Monet, Manet and Renoir), a short history of a Europe from about 1870 and a personal history of a family with an extraordinary tale to tell. The scale of the Ephrussis' wealth and influence was unimaginable (think Rothschild); the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna during the First World War plays out in parallel this autumn to Downton Abbey - although unlike the rather middlebrow Crawleys,  the Ephrussis' patronage, understanding and appreciation of art, music and literature shines through their family history. The accounts of the sacking, after the Anschluss in 1938, of the artistic treasures of the Palais Ephrussi by the Nazis, the expulsion of the family from their home and dreadful realisation that there is nothing for Viktor Ephrussi to do anymore (his business has been sequestered, he can't go to his cafe, the theatre or opera, his bookshop or barber, he cannot get on a tram or sit on a park bench) are amongst the most touching and poignant pages I have read.