It says at the bottom of the front cover "You have in your hands a masterpiece." This is true. Here you have a book that is beautifully conceived, extremely interesting, and very well written. ( )

I am not sure what halted my reading progress, maybe that the book had moved into WWII and the beginning of the Holocaust in Vienna. But once through that section I raced along with fascination on the trail of the netsukes and the warm, intimate revelations of the author as he digs and probes the people and their houses, their travels and collections in the 19th and 20th Centuries. A Russian banking family from Odessa, they set up concerns in Vienna, Paris, London on a par with and sometimes jointly with the Rothschilds and continued to collect art. One uncle was a contemporary of Proust. Another had a fantastic library. Another gifted a palace, artwork and gardens on the Riviera to the French Académie des Beaux Arts. Highly recommended.

One of many favorite quotes:

“Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.” ( )

I really enjoyed it, though I was left still wanting to know more about the netsuke themselves ( )

This was a beautifully told memoir (and history book) about Edmund De Waal's ancestors as he traces back the path of his inherited netsuke collection.

The book begins with Charles Ephrussi purchasing the collection in 1870s Paris where Charles is a patron of the arts and rubs elbows with many of the Impressionist painters and Proust, among other notables. With the next generation, the netsuke move on to high society in Vienna and then the horrors of Nazism and war. Lastly the netsuke end up in Tokyo after the war.
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Here's what I wrote in 2012 about this read: "Very nice, suprisingly. A very interesting family history told through the story of a treasured set of tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke. The family is Jewish, of immense wealth via banking, and loses nearly everything in WWII . . . but not the netsuke." ( )

Copy bought

This book disappointed, annoyed and fascinated me all at the same time. I'm tempted to give it a 2, but there were enough lovely sentences to give it a 3. I found the writing and treatment of the characters and topics incredibly pretentious. de Waal's skill at crafting sentences cannot be denied, but everything was so overladen with significance to the point that it verged on parody. Every thought, every vista, every piece of furniture was hyper-imbued with meaning--no ancestral purchase, daily task or friendship was unworthy of deep reflection. For me this work verged on and often into melodrama, which interfered greatly with the author's unfolding tale. ( )

3.5 probably
An interesting book, but with a habit of veering onto international antisemitism. More to follow ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book. Edmund de Waal has a talent for story telling. It has all the right ingredients for a good memoir- war, art, loss, regain, and a long family lineage to track. The time periods it covers is a fascinated time for France and the art world there. So many American expatriates at that period. It's fascinating and well told. ( )

This book with a profound emotional impact. The author, a potter and an artist, begins his narrative in a precise and refined vocabulary about art and art collecting and then goes into his family’s history.

De Waal’s father was a priest in the Church of England. His mother was a daughter of the Ephrussi family, who ran and owned banks in Paris, Rome, and Vienna. They were a very secular people, blending in with their fellow French, Italian, and Austro-Hungarian peers as members of the merchant class. They had come a long way from their great-grand parents who lived an impoverished rural life in the shtetl. They were cosmopolitans, and the Viennese Ephrussi were loyal Austrian citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It’s a tale of 19th century success, wealth and privilege in European capitals. The family were successful bankers. Because of their business acumen and because the Biblical prohibition against usury prohibited Christians from loaning money at interest to other Christians, just as it was unethical for Jews to loan to Jews. In 19th century Europe there were more Christians than Jews. As a result, the Bankers who were Jews had more customers, governments and firms that needed capital to invest.

Unfortunately for the Viennese Ephrussi, the Austro-Hungarian Empire shrunk to small, impoverished county after its defeat in the First World war. With the poverty that resulted from the terms of surrender, resentments against the rich by a majority Christian population fueled the fires of antisemitism. Then with the 1938 return of Austria’s most infamous son, Adolf Hitler, the Anschluss turned Austria into a part of the new German Empire. The Ephrussi were no longer citizens. They were Jews and their property, their art, their home and all its furnishings were confiscated. They were reduced to the choice of leaving or extermination. A few escaped to England, Mexico, and the United States. Those that remained died in concentration camps.

The author’s grandmother Elizabeth returned to Vienna after the war from England. Her former home was now American occupation forces. There she met and received from the family’s servant Anna, a gentile, the netsuke that Anna had smuggled out of the house in her apron and hid in her mattress, until she returned them to Elizabeth. These tiny Japanese sculptures were what remained of the family’s art collection. These tiny sculptures were the playthings of Elizabeth and her siblings. The rest of the collection had been confiscated by the Nazis and then resold to others after the war.

After Elizabeth returned to England she was visited in October 1947 by her brother Ignace, or Iggie as he was more commonly known. He was veteran of the American Army, a translator who conveyed to the officers of the German forces the terms of surrender. Now post war he was working for a grain exporting firm, which had offed him a choice of posting to either the Belgian Congo or Occupied Japan. After supper Elizabeth showed him the netsuke. This helped him decide on his next work assignment. “It’s Japan, he said. I’ll take them back.”

After he arrived, Iggie fell in love with Japan. He loved the language, the food, and the culture. He found a new job as a banker and found both success, and a partner, Jiro. They moved in together, and there Iggie spent the rest of his life.

Fifteen years after Iggie’s death in 1994, the author visited Jiro in Japan and was given the netsuke to take back to England. There they reside in an open display case, a vitrine, deaccessioned from the Victoria & Albert Museum and purchased by the author and his wife. He writes, “…I want our three kids to have a chance to get to know these netsuke as those children did a hundred years ago.” ( )

Loved this book: will stick with me. Started slow but somewhat like the unraveling research and story that is discovered by the author. Only odd thing: a neighbor who grew up in this social circle did not know the family. She thought it odd because it was a small world where everyone knew one another. ( )

While this is a memoir it is also a beautiful history. The writing is beautiful and made me want to savor each chapter. So often books approach the Holocaust and the focus is on the tragedy. While this is not a focus in the book we see what happens to de Waal's family in a different light. Excellent book. ( )

7% is am very confused byballnthe different characters and locations. ( )

I started to read this book since the blurb promised a sweeping epic family saga starting in Victorian era Paris centering around the authors great uncles collection of netsukes (japanese figurines)

But what I got instead was a flood of text,not keeping to one subject for a moment until rushing to the next. Names are tossed wildly into the narrative leaving you very confused "who is this again?" and "how is he or she related to the author?"

It lacked a thread to follow and just left me with a headache trying to read the densely written text.It was all so pretentious.

A DNF for me.

This intriguing history, which reads more like a novel, follows the fortunes and disaster befalling the wealthy Jewish Ephrussi family of Paris and Prague. Gaining their enormous riches from cornering the European grain market in the 1800s, they evade anti-Semitism by avoiding any public activities or expenditures for religious purposes. Charles, of the Paris branch, joins elite circles of writers (Proust) and painters (he actually appears in Renoir's painting, The Luncheon of the Boating Party) and acquires more than 200 netsuke (small ivory or boxwood statuettes used to clasp an obi together) during a Japonisme collecting period, and when he tires of his collection, sends them to Prague to a cousin as a wedding present. That family branch's wealth is confiscated by the Nazis and the family is scattered throughout the world. The author, a scion and a ceramicist, becomes fascinated with the netsuke, researched their history, and traveled to Japan to the home of his expat uncle Iggy to see them displayed there. There's hardly any illustrations of the netsuke, the very center of the story, in the book, which is disappointing, and more illustrations would have been preferable. The family tree in the frontpiece is very useful, ( )

The beginning chapters of this book are so tedious that I almost abandoned it. Once the real family history starts, together with a look at the time and place where family members lived, the work becomes more enjoyable. ( )

Using some inherited netsuke as a start, the author explores the history of his Jewish banking/trading family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The netsuke are followed as they pass from family member to family remember, are hidden, and are recovered. The author has some very interesting people in his lineage. I find it startling he had so little to go on at first, but one follows along while the amount of information he finds increases sharply. A good read. ( )

When Edmund de Waal inherited the netsuke collection of over two hundred Japanese wood and ivory carvings, they unlocked a far more dramatic story than he could ever have imagined. He traces their journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin-de-siècle Paris and then from occupied Vienna to postwar Tokyo, de Waal transforms his intimate family saga into a work of visual art.

Wonderful book, wonderfully written. Among many other things, it was fascinating how de Wall convincingly describes how he believed that his French family members were components of characters in Proust's [Remembrance of Things Past] along with their involvement with painters of the era. ( )

Objects, like people, have histories. Edmund de Waal's story of the netsuke he has inherited from his granduncle Iggie takes you from Paris to Vienna and from Tokyo to London with a stop in Odessa along the way. I would imagine this would be an interesting story regardless of the family involved in the hands of any skilled storyteller.

De Waal's family, however, was anything but average. They were the Ephrussi, a fabulously rich Jewish family of bankers that began its empire in Russia in the mid-1800s. Their banks spread over Western Europe by the late-nineteenth century only to be eliminated in World War II.

Throughout the book, de Waal interweaves stories of his great-great uncles, their cousins, and his great-grandparents with world events. And these he mixes with the everyday lives of his forebears, and the attitudes of Europeans towards the family and Jews in general.

Like the vitrines which hold the netsuke, de Waal's book is itself a cabinet of sorts, allowing us to peek into the lives and times of the people who owned them. I found it a deeply meditative book about the human conditiobn. The Ephrussi are held up as neither great nor as victims, but as real people shaped by their time and place.

The tragedy that visited his family is examined no more sympathetically than the Japanese are during the occupation after World War II. We are all similar, de Waal seems to be saying. We all share, in our humanity, the impulse for good and for ill. And we all suffer or benefit from these impulses from others. ( )

Well written and very well researched. Inspiring for writing one's own family history. However I was expecting the book to be art history, with emphasis on netsuke and the author's own pottery. Instead it was mostly about his wealthy family's history, and the persecutions of Jews. I felt the author was speaking down a tunnel to himself, and if I cared to listen it was quite interesting, but mostly the paragraphs seemed to be directed himself. I did enjoy parts of the book, particularly the tale of Manet's A Sprig of Asparagus, and indeed how Anna smuggled the netsuke into hiding. The author's attention to detail in describing the places he visited, and ability to envisage the places and people historically was exceptional. It was made even better with the pictures in this illustrated edition. Definitely an important book in Jewish History, but overall disappointed there was little of netsuke history. ( )

Parts of this book really gripped me, other parts were almost a struggle but I certainly learned some new things about European history. I think an interest in art and antiques would have helped my enjoyment but as it is I found the descriptions of all the treasures the family acquired somewhat tedious. However the netsuke, including the Hare of the title, were certainly the most interesting of them all and have quite a tale to tell. By tracing the owners of the collection of over 200 netsuke the author follows the fortunes of the family of his paternal grandmother-extremely wealthy Jewish bankers based in Paris & Vienna. Anyone with even a vague knowledge of the history of the last two centuries will realise this covers some momentous events.
I would recommend a visit to the author's website, as recommended at the end of the book, as there are some wonderful pictures of some of the netsuke and some further family pictures not included in the book. ( )

Interesting read. I didn't know anything about it when I picked it up, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Like others have said, it starts slow, but then the stories start. And the stories, and they way the author tells them, draw you in. ( )

I was recommended this book by a friend and had no idea what I was picking up to read. It is a very strange and moving account of someone trying to piece together their family history after it was all but obliterated during the war. The family were international bankers and traders with bases, at the beginning of the war, in Paris, Vienna and Odessa. By the end of the war it was all gone.

The author then goes to visit the building that remain that used to belong to their family. I cannot even begin to imagine what that was like even though he describes it well.

Part of this book is about how the Jews were stripped of their wealth and possessions and lives in Vienna. This process was witnessed by some Nazis and taken to Germany pretty much intact as a working model to be instituted there.

Unlike the David Cesarani book this book is replete with emotion and feeling and rewarding read. ( )

history, art, memoir, genealogy...it's all there in a cleverly woven tale spanning several generations and countries ( )