Review: The Hare with Amber Eyes

Published Dec 31, 2014

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by Edmund de Waal (Vintage Books)

For those who are aware of this winner of the 2010 Costa Biography Award, just ignore this late discovery, but I simply had to share it with readers who, like me, missed this one during the rush to read other books at the time.

Writer Edmund de Waal is a world-class ceramicist and if you google his name – as well as the Japanese art objects that first caught his fancy – you will be led into quite an extraordinary wonderland.

There are a few things about De Waal’s book that makes it so intriguing. For someone who hasn’t written before, his use of language is exquisite. It is the artist in him, the ceramicist who spends many quiet hours making his detailed pots and objets d’art, that fills his sentences with a sense of silence; detail that fills the corners of your mind and takes you back to the beginning of a sentence so as not to miss any of his delightful musings.

But it’s also the story, which is as strong as if it were fiction and not the life of his real family going back to the turn of the last century. It’s the time, it’s the place and it’s the people and their interests that grab you from beginning to end.

Who among us has not started some kind of collection?

But when you have the money to do so, plus the know-how, and you jump in – to find something magical that the rest of the world, for some reason, hasn’t yet found – it turns into something so much bigger.

Japanese art is what captured the heart and mind of Charles Ephrussi as he was trying to establish himself in Paris’s elite society at the turn of the century. More specifically, netsuke, which was introduced to the author by his great uncle Iggie and eventually became his to keep for the next generation.

That’s why he went back in his family’s history. He wanted to know where it started and how it travelled.

The story follows the collection from Paris to Vienna in the late 1920s and, then finally, to Tokyo.

When you think of the time, and Europe, what adds great fascination to the story of this particular family is that they were Jewish businessmen who made their money first in Odessa, before they travelled to Paris to establish themselves as part of the European world.

It might sound naive, but even though we all know about prejudice and hatred towards the other, have the Holocaust as a constant memory of what man does to man, it is the finer detail that often escapes your attention. Why would this one man, Hitler, suddenly develop this hatred for one people?

It has to come from somewhere and that is where this book dives into a different realm.

It’s not where the focus lies, but because it follows a family through a century. The patterns are clear and the details around their lives are more specific because of who they are and how the society they found themselves in treated them.

Is it possible to hate someone that much? We know the answer to that one and yet the world marches on hating and fighting battles that are seemingly never won.

Without getting into the Palestine/Israel debate, I found their determination to cling to their homeland suddenly much clearer than before.

When all your life you have been persecuted for no reason other than being part of the group of people you were born into, it makes sense to find something to call your own; somewhere no one can take away from you.

If they try to, you will fight to the death. It’s about only your survival.

But that’s not what dominates the story. Family and their need to hold hands and pass things on from generation to generation, to keep the memories alive in some fashion, is what runs through this story.

Without a particular mission from the start other than to discover his roots, De Waal does a magnificent job in walking us through the lives of others and holding our attention for this particular story that quite accidentally, touches on many of life’s larger issues. It’s breathtaking.

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