(no subject)

[skygiants]

I first put The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance on a mental to-read list when I read 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.

Comments

[sovay]

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.

I was thinking of you earlier today, because of archives. History should come with a warning about how distant it isn't.

[skygiants]

It truly should. The more one reads the more everything seems increasingly interconnected and also connected to the present, until it all starts to feel at the same time incredibly close and unnervingly like a Pynchon novel.

(What was the encounter with archives?)

[sovay]

(What was the encounter with archives?)

Cultural heritage first responders.

[skygiants]

Thanks for linking that article, I hadn't seen it! (I love how much the existence of digital archives opens up the cultural heritage first response process; you don't have to be boots-on-the-ground to participate.)

[starlady]

I enjoyed the book a lot, and I as a historian of Japan I thought he made some points that often aren't emphasized enough about the period of the collection's acquisition, and the stuff about his great-uncle's (gay) life in Japan was also great--I would have loved more of it. I have his grandmother's novel sitting on my shelf but I haven't read it yet. I'm also always on the lookout for a copy of the illustrated edition to supplement my ebook.

I think constantly, too, about the wealthy neighbor who simply up and left Austria the day after the Anschluss. And his grandmother, who spent her whole life as he says trying to cross the street to the university and then found herself trying to cross the Channel. It really is a good, at times painful book.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I agree -- he does a really thoughtful job talking about the fad for Orientalism and japonisme and the way that was framed in European art. I also would have loved more time talking about his great-uncle and Jiro, but I imagine it ironically gets increasingly difficult to write the sort of sweeping character-exploration-through-objects the closer that person gets to you, which is perhaps why he spends the most time on the distant-but-well-documented figure of Charles.

I'd be really fascinated to hear what you think about his grandmother's novel! I didn't know it had been published in a way that anyone could read.

[starlady]

I have it in paper, but I believe you can also get it as an ebook! Persephone Press brought it out in 2013.

[sovay]

Persephone Press brought it out in 2013.

I did not buy it on sight in a used book store in 2019 and I regret this decision to this day.

[nineveh_uk]

Assuming you mean 'The Exiles Return', it is well worth a read. Better as an accompaniment to Hare, and indictment of post-war Austria letting itself off the hook than as a novel, perhaps, but very interesting, and with some excruciating scenes of people trying to avoid admitting there's an issue.

[rachelmanija]

I own this and I need to read it.

[skygiants]

I will really look forward to hearing what you think of it when you get around to it.

[cyphomandra]

I loved this book. I tracked down the illustrated edition to get everything even clearer in my mind but seeing the exhibition would be fantastic (although as you say there’s still a distance there that the text really does already erase successfully).

[skygiants]

The illustrated edition is gorgeous! I almost bought a copy from the museum bookstore, but it seemed a little excessive given that I already had both my grandfather's copy (though I then lent it back to my mom) and another identical copy of mysterious provenance at home.

[thistleingrey]

Thanks for sharing this. The book's on my tbr, and somehow I've been saving it in case my mood ruined it (as happens sometimes lately) because I really want to read it, the whole thing. I'll get there.

[skygiants]

It took me 11 years to get around to it after it made it onto my TBR, but the time when I read it turned out to be exactly right -- I hope it ends up being the same for you whenever that time comes.

[chestnut_pod]

Well, you already know how much I feel about Edmund de Waal. So let me just say that I am so happy that you came around to it in good time and at a good time, and got so much from it.

[skygiants]

I truly did! My only regret is that if I'd actually read it in 2011 I might have been able to talk about it with my grandfather before he died -- but tbh I probably wouldn't have, I was extremely bad at actually talking About His Experiences with him any time I had an opportunity to do so and there's no reason to think this would have been any different.

[sdelmonte]

In 2020, a month before the lockdowns, I took the book out of the library because the exhibition was coming to my then-employer's galleries. I couldn't finish. The lockdown started, and even though I had no new library books for four months, I still couldn't finish it. Then I was let go by the museum and I returned it. There was just something so utterly offputting about the reminiscences of de Waal. I don't know how I would feel about the exhibition (not going to museums right now and really not going there any time soon), but I looked it up, and at least the curators are smart ones and the designers are really good.

Also, as we were going to see someone else on a hit and run visit to NYC, the express bus naturally passed your parents' NYC home coming from the tunnel and I was thinking "hey, that's where we were last summer." Little did I know...

[nextian]

Man. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[lirazel]

I've been meaning to read this one--thank you for sharing your thoughts on it!