NEW YORK, NY.- Like a dream that comes to life, the 264 carved, miniature Japanese carvings (netsuke) we encountered in reading Edmund de Waal’s celebrated memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), appear centerstage in the current exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York (November 19, 2021-May 15, 2022), which bears the same title as the book (https://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-hare-with-amber-eyes). I first read the memoir as a fellow at the Rifkind Humanities Center at The City College of New York, where our group evenly divided between those who read the work as a meditation on the nature of objects and those who were inclined to read it as a saga about family trauma. Recently, I reread the memoir in a handsome, illustrated edition that describes the provenance of the netsuke along with photographs of them (and with other family photographs)— the volume itself represents a kind of transitional space between the original memoir and the current exhibit. In oscillating between understanding the memoir aesthetically and psychologically, my ambivalence has persisted after seeing the exhibit and has left me in a troubled state of mind.

First, a little bit about the history about the netsuke through the generations of the Ephrussi family. The family origins can be traced back to the shtetl of Berdichev, but they rose to prominence as grain merchants and bankers in Odessa, and then because of anti-Semitism and greater opportunities gravitated westward to Vienna and Paris. The family became fabulously wealthy—on a par (and intermarried) with the Rothschilds. The netsuke collection was started by the intriguing figure, Charles Ephrussi, an aesthete, author and collector, who opted out of the family business and became a well-known figure in Paris, so compelling that Proust apparently used him as a model for the figure of Swan in his novel. Charles’ fascination with netsuke was part of the Japonisme trend in 19th century Paris, which valued these objects as representative of Japanese culture prior to the influence of the West. Charles Ephrussi was immersed in the art world of Europe, wrote a monograph on Dürer, and was an early collector of impressionist paintings (befriending artists like Monet and Renoir). Was there something about his attraction to the netsuke that derived from an implicit curiosity about otherness? With the rise of anti-Semitism in France, Charles was viciously attacked, and the whole family was profoundly impacted by the Dreyfus affair; the family home was searched at one point as a possible hideaway for Émile Zola, the writer who famously came to the defense of Dreyfus.

The next step in the journey occurred when Charles bequeathed the netsuke collection it to his cousin Viktor and his wife, Emmy (De Waal’s great grandparents) for the occasion of their marriage who lived in Vienna. Viktor had intellectual aspirations, and had a large personal library, but ultimately felt compelled to join the family business. In Vienna, the netsuke were displayed in Emmy’s drawing room within the family’s immense palace on the Ringstrasse-- a demotion of sorts not to be displayed more prominently, but also a way for the objects to be available to be played with and enjoyed by the children. From that point forward, the collection of Netsuke took on a precarious fate, allegedly saved, one by one under a mattress, by a servant of the house, after the Anschluss, when the Gestapo appropriated the Ephrussi home after trashing the furniture and stealing the artwork. (There is some controversy over the accuracy of this story, according to the Vienna exhibition catalogue). After the war, Elisabeth, De Waal’s grandmother, returned to Vienna and took the netsuke collection back to England; subsequently, they were sent to Ignace, her brother. who moved to Tokyo after the war, after having served in the American military. The netsuke were apparently prominently displayed in vitrines in Ignace’s home until his death, when de Waal inherited them. So, the memoir tells the story of the netsuke’s journey from Paris to Vienna to Tokyo to London. From a volume published by the Jewish Museum in Vienna in connection with an earlier version of the exhibit, we learn that the family has donated the collection to the museum, although some of the pieces were auctioned off to benefit refugees in England.

As a highly regarded, minimalist potter, de Waal is exquisitely sensitive to the craftsmanship that is manifest in many of the netsuke. The exhibit has a recording of his voice talking about what it feels like to hold these objects, made of ivory and wood, physically in hand, and he refers to the pleasure of carrying them around in his pocket. De Waal admires the netsuke for their ordinariness as objects: that originally, they served the practical, everyday purpose as complements to kimonos. He prizes these objects that have become valuable over time; however, he mainly emphasizes the aesthetic pleasure they provide, as they are both funny and strange. He delights, for example, in the ivory carving about carving in wood, which depicts a cooper working on a half-finished barrel. Although I experienced seeing the netsuke at the exhibit as exciting, it was also frustrating, as looking at them precluded the tactile experience that De Waal so relished. The netsuke are detailed and require close attention. I laughed out loud at one that depicts an embrace between a woman and an octopus, which seems to suggest a (beastly) erotic encounter. I have seen images of netsuke that depicted an octopus attacking a woman, but this one seems to countenance the octopus as the intelligent, wily animal that we have come to admire.




The netsuke are, of course, symbolic objects that operate on multiple levels and requires some unpacking. They are symbolic in capturing daily life in 18th and 19th century Japan, reflecting the lives and concerns of the craftsmen who created them. They are also symbolic cross-culturally, representing the fascination with Japanese art and aesthetics, a cultural appropriation that must have appealed to Charles, whose Russian citizenship after he emigrated to France inspired skepticism and whose status was damaged because of anti-Semitism. A crucial symbolic aspect of the netsuke is how they mirrored the fortune and fate of the Ephrussi family, across several countries and surviving through a mixture of conscious effort and sheer luck. They mark the endurance of the family at the hands of the virulent anti-Semitism that pervaded the 19th and 20th century in Europe (There is no straight line from Dreyfus to Auschwitz, but I recall my shock at noticing on the Dreyfus family tombstone at the Montparnasse cemetery that his granddaughter was murdered in Auschwitz). While the netsuke survived, not much else did. Their smallness as objects must be juxtaposed against the monumental enormity of their loss.

The symbolism of the netsuke, we can infer, is a marker of trauma. So much else disappeared, but these small beloved objects managed to avoid that fate. De Waal’s story is a miraculous, one that he weaved together over the course of many years. The tale features legacy over identity. De Waal is forthright about wishing to keep some things private (the subtitle of the memoir is the ambiguous “A Hidden Inheritance”). It is perfectly justifiable for de Waal to limit his report to focus on his family, but the reader is left with wanting to know more about how he understands his relation to this history. Our curiosity has no power to command de Waal to disclose more about himself than he sees as necessary. Still: I found myself repeatedly wondering whether this project has left him feeling more or less connected to the Ephrussi clan.

Along the way, we manage to learn a bit about de Waal’s identity beyond that he is a potter who spent time studying in Japan. He is, we learn, the son of the Dean of Canterbury, presumably brought up as a Christian. An ecumenical spirit clearly presides in de Waal’s family, though, as his father (whose mother, Elisabeth was born Jewish) recited Kaddish at the death of his mother. In general, the Ephrussis were not observant Jews, although their history is intertwined with anti-Semitism, to which de Waal pays ample attention. The ballroom in the palace on the Ringstrasse, obviously a public space, prominently displayed paintings from the biblical book of Esther, a choice that de Waal believes is an assertion of their identity: “Here on Zionstrasse is a bit of Zion.” Also, while de Waal’s grandmother, Elisabeth, converted expediently to facilitate the pursuit of higher education, he notes that she shocked him when she was 90 years old by saying that she had insisted when growing up on having a Jewish education to her father’s surprise. De Waal’s project can be construed as a Jewish one, given how passionately consumed it is with the obligation to remember. Working on the Viennese part of the story, he leans in to inform us that “I am listening to Mahler and reading Schnitzler ad Loos, and feeling very Jewish myself.” Nevertheless, the book is not about reclaiming a Jewish identity, and de Waal even distances himself from his family to some extent by reporting on writers, like Joseph Roth, who portrayed them negatively (the family is also mentioned in stories by Issac Babel and Sholem Aleichem).

It is not easy to venture much of an opinion on the impact of writing the memoir on de Waal’s identity. He is clearly reticent to portray the story as tragic, warning us that he did not want to write “some elegaic Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.” Yet, it is impossible to imagine that de Waal would not have strong emotions about the traumatic fate his family suffered, and so we are forced to accept his choice not to articulate the implications of fathoming his family history in the memoir. The theory of intergenerational transmission of trauma might predict that he is affected, but perhaps there is a case to be made to the contrary. In his most recent book, Letters to Camondo, de Waal is more self-disclosing: that he was brought up, in fact, in the Church of England; that his identity is as “half-English, a quarter Dutch, and a quarter Austrian, and completely European”; that he feels an affinity with Quakers and with Japanese Buddhism; and that he does not see himself returning as a Jew as much as a witness. It must make a difference, though, to witness something traumatic that has happened in your own family, not just in history. De Waal’s status is liminal: it challenges either/or categories and leaves us unresolved about how history weighs on his identity.

In the memoir, we are not privy to de Waal’s self-reflection; nor does the exhibit help us to address such questions. The exhibit does enrich our understanding of the atmosphere in which the Ephrussis lived, displaying numerous family pictures and other paintings, and even a large Torah parochet that was a gift from the family to the synagogue in Vienna. Documentation of the administrative letters, where the family signed over their property to the Nazis are discretely concealed behind a wall, as if to limit the space this occupies in the story. The weight of the exhibit centers around the remarkable netsuke and their perdurance, which are seen in three different rooms (and also as images projected against the wall in the last room). They are truly delightful and charming, but as I exited the building and headed into Central Park, I was surprised to find myself struggling with unruly emotions—horror, fury, and sadness. I coaxed myself through this moment, gazing downtown, suspicious that the raw emotions that emerged had been communicated, in some unspoken way, from the netsuke themselves.

by: Elliot L. Jurist, Ph.D., Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Psychology, The City College of New York
Doctoral Faculty in Psychology and in Philosophy, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Author, MINDING EMOTIONS (https://www.guilford.com/books/Minding-Emotions/Elliot-Jurist/9781462534999)
Website: https://www.elliotjurist.com