The Hare With Amber Eyes By Edmund De Waal

What This Book Actually Is

The Hare with Amber Eyes is a family memoir by Edmund de Waal, published in 2010. It traces the Ephrussi family, a Jewish banking dynasty with roots in the Ottoman Empire, their collection of Japanese netsuke, and how the family's fortunes collapsed during the Holocaust. The "hare" in the title refers to a small porcelain figurine that became a relic of memory passed down through generations. The book won the Samuel Johnson Prize that year and has been praised for its restrained prose. I read this because a colleague recommended it casually, the way you'd recommend a sandwich. I expected another sprawling genealogy memoir full of elegiac longing. What I got was tighter than that. De Waal is a potter and a writer, and his sensibility shows up early. He treats objects — particularly the 264 Japanese netsuke his family collected — as structural anchors for a narrative that jumps across three centuries and four countries. The first thing to understand is that this is not a conventional history. It does not situate itself firmly within any single historiographical tradition. Instead it uses personal archives — photographs, letters, diary fragments — alongside factual research. That means the factual backbone is verified, but the connective tissue is sometimes interpretive. You should read it as narrative nonfiction, not as academic scholarship. When de Waal fills gaps in the record, he tends to do so through reconstruction and empathy rather than speculation. That works well in practice. There are moments where the emotional weight does more work than documentary evidence would.

The book is divided into two interleaved strands. One strand follows the Ephrussi family from their origins in Iași, Romania, through Vienna, Paris, and London, with emphasis on their accumulation of wealth, culture, and objects. The second strand follows de Waal himself, who becomes curator of the Vitra Design Museum and later discovers the porcelain hare among other dispersed items. The two timelines converge more in the final sections than they do in the first half. If you find yourself bored in section one, push through. The payoff is not sentimental — it is structural. There is a practical detail that most readers miss. The Ephrussi collection included works by Rodin, Monet, Cézanne, and Degas, not just netsuke. The netsuke are the thread, but the broader art collection is what makes the family's story legible within art history. When you encounter references to the Galerie Georges Petit or the 1938 Aryanization seizures, those are real events anchored to real transactions. The book does not invent the timeline. It uses the netsuke — small carved figures of hares, frogs, and gods — as a way to track displacement and survival without turning every page into a Holocaust report. That restraint is deliberate and mostly effective. One issue that came up for me while reading was how de Waal handles the silence around certain family members, particularly women. The narrative gives slightly more space to male figures connected to the banking and collecting enterprises. I found myself cross-referencing with other sources on the Ephrussi lineage, and I noticed that figures like Rachel and Madeleine get summarized rather quickly. This is not necessarily a flaw in de Waal's approach — it reflects the source material available to him — but it is worth noting if you intend to use this book as a serious reference point for the family's internal dynamics.

Another counter-intuitive insight: the netsuke themselves are almost entirely absent from the book's central drama. They function as a framing device, not as subjects of deep connoisseurship. De Waal does not write like a dealer or a scholar evaluating market value, carving technique, or period attribution. He writes like someone handling an object that survived something. If you are looking for a detailed study of netsuke collecting in the late nineteenth century, this is not the book. It is a book about memory and loss, using a collection as its vessel. The technical descriptions of individual pieces are sparse, and that is by design. There is a moment in the book where de Waal visits the former Ephrussi estate in Paris and finds it empty, reduced to a government building. The scene is understated to the point of near-invisibility on the page. Some readers will find that frustrating. I did not. It matches the book's overall aesthetic, which privileges absence over exhibition. That aesthetic choice carries consequences. The narrative occasionally feels thin where archival evidence is weak, and de Waal himself acknowledges this at several points. He does not pretend to fill every gap. In terms of where to get the book, it is widely available through standard retailers and libraries. The hardcover and paperback editions are both solid. The audiobook is narrated by the author, which adds a layer of authenticity since de Waal has the voice of someone who has spent years thinking about these events aloud. His pacing is slow, deliberate, and often appropriate. There are moments where the narration edges toward melancholy, but it stays within bounds. I prefer the print edition for referencing specific passages, but the audiobook is viable for a first pass.

The book's weaknesses are real but manageable. The middle section, which covers the interwar period and the family's gradual displacement, drags slightly. The prose remains clean, but the narrative tension reduces because the outcome is historically known and essentially predetermined. De Waal counters this by shifting focus toward personal objects and small domestic scenes rather than large political events. It works, but it means you will not find a gripping chronological thriller here. You will find something closer to a meditation, paced over roughly 400 pages in most editions. For anyone interested in the specific history of Jewish collecting families in Europe, or in the mechanics of cultural looting during the Nazi era, this book provides a focused case study. It is not encyclopedic. It does not attempt to cover the broader institutional history of restitution efforts or the postwar return of artworks. It stays close to one family and one collection. That limitation is also its strength. The narrow scope lets de Waal avoid the common mistake that plague many family histories — trying to be everything at once. If you want to dig deeper after reading, I would suggest pairing it with primary sources on the Ephrussi family if you can find them, or with general works on the Art Loss Register and provenance research. The networks described in the book are real, and the institutions that handled their collections after the war continue to operate. A practical tip: the British Library and the Wiener Library in London hold related materials, though access may require prior arrangement. Do not expect the book to serve as a research manual. It is literature, not an archive.

The bottom line is that this book is well-constructed, carefully written, and occasionally underplayed to the point of test. It earned its awards without being overbearing about it. Most readers will finish it and think about the objects that outlive their owners. That is enough for me.