The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, Vintage $24.95.
The book that sold itself is how I think of Hare. A word-of-mouth sensation, published last year but still selling strongly and dazzling readers wherever it goes.
It’s a true but scarcely grabby plot: the author, a noted ceramicist, inherits his great uncle Iggy’s collection of wood and ivory animal carvings, known as netsuke. Who knew, who cared, about netsuke?
But these 264 traditional Japanese miniatures are just the thread on which to hang a brilliant family memoir, starting in Odessa in the mid-1800s and winding through Vienna, Paris and Tokyo as generations of the Ephrussi go from grain merchants to prominent Jewish bankers, rivals to the Rothschilds, only to lose everything when the Nazis march into Austria in a shocking prelude to the outbreak of second World War.
These are extraordinary people going through extraordinary times, rubbing shoulders with Proust and Degas, witness to the Dreyfus trial, creating palaces and art galleries and assimilating perfectly everywhere — which, the author implies, is the very thing the anti-Semites couldn’t tolerate.
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