Book 74 - Edmund de Waal "The Hare With Amber Eyes"

Edmund de Waal "The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance" (Vintage)




Some objects quietly survive the upheavals of private history.  

 In De Waal's family, infinitely more distinguished then mine, it is netsuke. Admired for its subtlety in Paris by the author's ancestor, the model for Proust's Swann, the netsuke collection was an appropriate wedding gift to go to a splendid household in Vienna, where the small carvings were durable enough to be played with by the children as mother dressed for the opera, then inconspicuous enough to be overlooked by looting Nazi soldiers who carried off showy oil paintings. An eccentric relative took the collection back to Japan after World War II, and decades later gave it to a British relative, the author, who appreciates spare Japanese aesthetics. As in Japanese art, the book's most compelling message is gently implied.

The link in the survival of the netsuke collection during World War II is a Viennese servant named Anna, a Christian serving a Jewish family. She must have appreciated the small ivory pieces as she secretly rescued them and returned them to the family after the war. Her last name is forgotten. We can only guess what her thoughts were. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, the author thanks his own family including his children Ben, Matthew and Anna.