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Apr. 9th, 2022 09:40 pmI first put The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance on a mental to-read list when I read ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks' review from the year he spent reading a book every day -- a review that stuck enough in my mind that I immediately remembered it almost a decade later when my dad handed me the book on a trip home and told me that he'd really enjoyed it and thought I would too.
Despite all this, I didn't actually get around to reading it until two weeks ago, whengenarti and I went on a lightning visit to NYC with her parents (apologies to all the NYC friends we did not get to see while we were in parental tour guide mode) and discovered that a.) there was a exhibit up about it at the Jewish Museum in NYC and b.) both my father (as aforementioned) and Beth's mother had read the book, which is relevant because c.) arranging introductions and mutually agreeable activities for both sets of parents was also one of the goals of the trip. I finished the book the night before we went to the museum, which turned out great for me as I then got to be the person with the best memory of everything in it and spent the entire museum visit eagerly pointing at pieces of art and enthusiastically recounting factoids, most of which were also clearly written on the walls of the exhibit. I assume this was also deeply appreciated by everyone else in the party.
The Hare With Amber Eyes is simultaneously very suited and very unsuited to being a museum exhibit. The book is the result of ceramic artist Edmund de Waal's inheritance of a collection of Japanese netsuke via his great-uncle's partner via his great-uncle via his grandmother via the maid who smuggled them out of the family mansion in Austria after the family business was forcibly Aryanized via his great-grandmother via his great-grandmother's cousin, nineteenth-century Jewish art collector and connoisseur Charles Ephrussi.
Edmund de Waal -- not, himself, raised either Jewish or wealthy, or at least not anywhere near as absurdly wealthy as the Ephrussi banking clan in their heyday -- uses the netsuke as a lens through which to conceptualize the lives of each of the people through whose hands they passed. He is interested in the physical and the specific; he is interested in how people handled objects, and in what the objects that they handled say about them. He wants to be able to touch his family history, as much as he is at all able. You simply cannot do that in a museum. Still, there's something to be said for the ability to look at a famous painting by a famous artist, placed on a wall that is still a museum wall but in a different context, recontextualized not as Art (generic) but as a specific present from one real person to another.
Speaking of specific chains of legacy, from one real person to another: I didn't know until I was talking with my dad about it, the night I finished, how he had come to read the book. It seems that his copy belonged to my grandfather, my mother's father; my dad and my uncle were helping my mom and her sister clear out his house after he died, and my uncle (a rabbi) pulled it off the shelf and told my dad he ought to try this one.
My grandfather's mother, for the record, was the granddaughter of Leopold Ullstein, founder of the Ullstein-Verlag publishing empire in Germany, which was forcibly Aryanized in 1933. In my grandfather's memoirs, he writes: the aura of the Ullsteins pervaded the family, and throughout our life in Germany the fact of our Ullstein heritage was pervasive. I still have the Ullstein silver, engraved with their characteristic U [...] Of course, it didn't help that our daily paper and weekly magazine, as well as most of our books, were published by Ullstein, and my mother's clothes were modeled after Ullstein patterns.
My grandfather fled Germany with his mother in 1933. My mom has his Ullstein silver set now, with its characteristic U, and I have this book from my grandfather's shelf, about a Jewish family in late nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe that was tremendously wealthy and powerful and acculturated, until they weren't. That was something of a recontextualization, also.
rushthatspeaks' review from the year he spent reading a book every day -- a review that stuck enough in my mind that I immediately remembered it almost a decade later when my dad handed me the book on a trip home and told me that he'd really enjoyed it and thought I would too. Despite all this, I didn't actually get around to reading it until two weeks ago, when
genarti and I went on a lightning visit to NYC with her parents (apologies to all the NYC friends we did not get to see while we were in parental tour guide mode) and discovered that a.) there was a exhibit up about it at the Jewish Museum in NYC and b.) both my father (as aforementioned) and Beth's mother had read the book, which is relevant because c.) arranging introductions and mutually agreeable activities for both sets of parents was also one of the goals of the trip. I finished the book the night before we went to the museum, which turned out great for me as I then got to be the person with the best memory of everything in it and spent the entire museum visit eagerly pointing at pieces of art and enthusiastically recounting factoids, most of which were also clearly written on the walls of the exhibit. I assume this was also deeply appreciated by everyone else in the party. The Hare With Amber Eyes is simultaneously very suited and very unsuited to being a museum exhibit. The book is the result of ceramic artist Edmund de Waal's inheritance of a collection of Japanese netsuke via his great-uncle's partner via his great-uncle via his grandmother via the maid who smuggled them out of the family mansion in Austria after the family business was forcibly Aryanized via his great-grandmother via his great-grandmother's cousin, nineteenth-century Jewish art collector and connoisseur Charles Ephrussi.
Edmund de Waal -- not, himself, raised either Jewish or wealthy, or at least not anywhere near as absurdly wealthy as the Ephrussi banking clan in their heyday -- uses the netsuke as a lens through which to conceptualize the lives of each of the people through whose hands they passed. He is interested in the physical and the specific; he is interested in how people handled objects, and in what the objects that they handled say about them. He wants to be able to touch his family history, as much as he is at all able. You simply cannot do that in a museum. Still, there's something to be said for the ability to look at a famous painting by a famous artist, placed on a wall that is still a museum wall but in a different context, recontextualized not as Art (generic) but as a specific present from one real person to another.
Speaking of specific chains of legacy, from one real person to another: I didn't know until I was talking with my dad about it, the night I finished, how he had come to read the book. It seems that his copy belonged to my grandfather, my mother's father; my dad and my uncle were helping my mom and her sister clear out his house after he died, and my uncle (a rabbi) pulled it off the shelf and told my dad he ought to try this one.
My grandfather's mother, for the record, was the granddaughter of Leopold Ullstein, founder of the Ullstein-Verlag publishing empire in Germany, which was forcibly Aryanized in 1933. In my grandfather's memoirs, he writes: the aura of the Ullsteins pervaded the family, and throughout our life in Germany the fact of our Ullstein heritage was pervasive. I still have the Ullstein silver, engraved with their characteristic U [...] Of course, it didn't help that our daily paper and weekly magazine, as well as most of our books, were published by Ullstein, and my mother's clothes were modeled after Ullstein patterns.
My grandfather fled Germany with his mother in 1933. My mom has his Ullstein silver set now, with its characteristic U, and I have this book from my grandfather's shelf, about a Jewish family in late nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe that was tremendously wealthy and powerful and acculturated, until they weren't. That was something of a recontextualization, also.
