The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

“The Hare with Amber Eyes” is a museum book—and the main characters here are objects: netsuke figurines, archival storerooms, spiral staircases. However, unlike classic museums, there are no signs saying “Don’t touch with your hands”; it’s the opposite.

De Waal’s book is entirely tactile. The author tells the story of his ancestors through their collections, picking through one exhibit after another—gently and carefully—as we rummage through grandma and grandpa’s things in the attic, wiping dust off patterns and rustling thick yellow paper. The difference is that De Waal isn’t rummaging in the attic of his home, but in the halls of history—in the archives of the de Goncourts, Marcel Proust, Claude Monet, and many other writers and artists his grandfathers and great-grandfathers were friends with (Charles Ephrussi, the author’s great-grandfather, was the model for Proust’s Swann).

A passionate collector, De Waal is so meticulous that he managed to trace the entire path of his netsuke figurines from Japan to France—19th-century Paris—then to 20th-century Vienna, and further through the prickly wire of the 1930s and 1940s, when the figurines were saved from the brown plague by the efforts of a brave girl—and still onward, closer and closer to the reader over time.

Who is this book for?

For everyone who enjoys the biographies of remarkable people and family sagas

For fans of 20th-century history

For those who would like to learn about everyday life in early-century Europe—during the First World War and the 1930s