The hare of the title is in fact a tiny Japanese figurine, belonging to the category of netsuke, traditional miniature sculptures which were being carved by Japanese artists and craftsmen long before Commodore Perry's expedition famously opened Japan up to the outside world. Netsuke are delicately and skilfully carved, often from ivory, on a wide variety of mainly everyday themes (animals, children, tradespeople, fruits, household objects), but are also quite robust, designed to be handled, for example to function as "buttons" on clothing.
Though these objects fascinate de Waal (he is himself a craftsman-artist, a potter), the book is not principally about the netsuke, but uses them as a focal point for a family memoir over four generations, a family whose fate was intricately intertwined with the contorted history of Europe from the late nineteeth century onwards.
The starting point, after an initial encounter with the netsuke in the author's Uncle Iggy's Tokyo flat, is late nineteenth century Paris, a time and place associated indelibly with new artistic trends, notably impressionism, and a connected passion for all things Japanese - le japonisme". De Waal's (sort of) great great uncle, Charles Ephrussi, is a rich patron of the arts from a Jewish family with origins in Russia, a family which originally made its money through grain trading in Odessa. The Ephrussis subsequently went into banking and became even richer on the back of a pan-European banking operation linking parts of the family based principally in Paris, Vienna and Odessa. At their peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ephrussis are a truly continental, truly cosmopolitan family, integrated into the establishment of the cities they inhabit but with a wider view of the world.
Charles Ephrussi is no slouch at business, but is principally reputed for his activities as a patron of the arts, and in particular for being a strong supporter of the impressionist movement. Indeed, you almost certainly know him already - he is the anomalously black-suited and top-hatted figure at the back of the jovial group pictured by Renoir in his Luncheon of the Boating Party, included by the artist in a grateful clin d'oeil. It is Charles also who, caught up in the japonisme of the time, acquires a collection of 284 netsuke from Japan and displays them in a glass cabinet in his home, the Palais Ephrussi in Paris.
Charles has a rather gilded life, but there are hints of trouble to come during the Dreyfuss affair in France, which sees a rise in anti-semitic sentiment in France and Charles himself, pillar of the establishment though he may be, suffering snubs, slights and exclusions, even from the progressive artists he has supported. However, de Waal's account leaves Paris, when the netsuke are given by Charles as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor who lives in late-Hapsburg Vienna, at a palatial residence on the then new and highly fashionable Ringstrasse.
The middle section of the book is an account of the fortunes of the Vienna Ephrussis, in a period when the tides of history run strongly against them: the collapse of the Hapsburg state at the end of the First World War (a war which also placed different parts of the banking empire in different belligerent states), the new Austrian Republic, beset with revolutionary agitation and thuggish right-wing violence, a steady rise in anti-semitism and the Nazi takeover in the 1938 Anschluss by Hitler's Germany. Throughout much of this - a surprising amount of it - the genteel but declining Ephrussi lifestyle continues, Viktor's daughter, Elisabeth, even manages to enter university and qualify as a lawyer - almost unheard of in conservative Vienna. But the Anschluss brings the cataclysm, a brutal "aryanisation": first the wild sacking, then the more systematic Gestapo-led confiscation of the Ephrussis' property. The family is persecuted, scattered, brutalised, and in some cases ultimately transported to concentration camps to end up in Auschwitz. The family fortune is destroyed and the Ephrussis who survive are those who flee westwards, in particular to England and the United States.
It is after the war, that Elisabeth, the lawyer daughter, now living in Tunbridge Wells, seeks reparation for some of the losses and even once returns to the former family home, now used as offices by occupying US forces. Somehow, she finds one or two paintings have survived, but the real revelation is that the Ephrussis' former maid, Anna, an "Aryan" whom the Gestapo employed to help catalogue and redistribute the family's art work, had discreetly secreted the small and easily overlooked netsuke in her clothes and stored them them for the duration of the war in her mattress against the day when their owner might reappear.
Whence the netsuke's journey to England, and later, thanks to Elisabeth's brother Iggy, who in pre-war days had already moved to America, and in the aftermath of the conflict, to Tokyo, to their country of origin Japan. It is there, during a visit to his Uncle Iggy, that the author (who will subsequently inherit them himself) first becomes acquainted with the netsuke and begins his quest to uncover their peregrinations around Europe and the world.
De Waal himself is a key figure in the book, even though it is not about him. It is his quest for his family's history, his feelings and reactions as he visits the places which play such a central role in the story. But he is also a modest, self-effacing narrator, very hard not to like and admire. Perhaps this is how he manages to pull off a remarkable feat in this book, the intimate connection of the small, personal and everyday with the huge world-changing events of history, so seamlessly. The netsuke stand for this: small, modestly beautiful, often unobserved, yet present - and surviving - through all the cataclysms. There is perhaps a philosophy of life here: as another writer had it, in the "god of small things".
Recommendation? Read it, of course.
See pictures of the netsuke
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