Much, much too rich for his own good

Before picking up The Hare With Amber Eyes, I was under the impression it was fiction. My heart sank on discovering it's a family memoir. I'm not a fan of this sort of non-fiction unless it's warts-and-all, or humorous and self-deprecating. But it was a Book Club choice, so I swiped to the first page and began reading.

The book's set in late 19th century Europe, WW1, and the inter-war years of the 20th century. French art and literature loom large, both of which are interests of mine. So far so good. As for the family, it takes in three generations of the Ephrussi bankers, from whom de Waal is descended. He says, "I know that my family were Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich". He traces these ancestors using a collection of 264 netsuke as a device, moving through generations and locations according to who owns the small Japanese carvings, one of which is the titular amber-eyed hare.

We start in Paris with Charles Ephrussi, who is "much, much too rich for his own good". Ho hum, I thought. Charles walks "seemingly without effort, into the formidable, fashionable salons of the day", although I would guess his disposable cash has something to do with that. He commissions works of art from Renoir, and is one of the men on which Proust based Swann in A la recherche du temps perdu. They have the same first name, you see. It is Charles who buys the 264 netsuke.

The action moves to Vienna when Charles gives the netsuke to his cousin Viktor as a wedding gift. De Waal notes the rise of anti-semitic behaviour in Europe around this time, but the Ephrussi family aren't much affected by it, no doubt shielded by their wealth. Viktor's wife Emmy keeps the netsuke in her dressing room, and her children play with them as she gets ready to go for lunch with one of her lovers, or while she's being dressed for dinner or the opera. When the Nazis march into Vienna in 1938, Viktor and his wife must vacate their Palais and suffer all their belongings to be confiscated.

At this point De Waal's writing style was beginning to get on my nerves. He says "I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss". So there's no nostalgia, no feeling sorry for them, no tragedy. As a consequence the narrative feels indifferent about its characters. Instead we get lots of facts, pages that list artworks with their descriptions, pages that read like a travel guide or a historical chronology.

Fortunately there is one hero in the book; the maid Anna, a "gentile" who saves all the netsuke. Hurrah for Anna! And yet nothing is known of her, not even her last name. De Waal admits, "I know too much about the traces of my gilded family, but I cannot find out any more about Anna. She is not written about, refracted into stories. She is not left money in Emmy's will: there is no will. She does not leave traces in the ledgers of dealers or of dress-makers." He continues, "I never thought to ask, when I could have asked. She was, simply, Anna." How proud and careful these wealthy people were of their possessions. How educated, how charitable and yet they know nothing of the people with whom they spend half their days, being dressed by them, trusting their secrets to them. They keep them out of sight and out of mind. This said more to me than anything else in the book.

Apart from Anna, the only other character of interest was de Waal's grandmother Elisabeth. She managed to secure herself an education when universities only accepted men. We're told little else about her, although it was she who "took the little attaché case with the jumble of netsuke home" to England. In this world of the wealthy, it was men who were expected to make their mark, men who, when not making pots of cash from other people's cash, spent their money on possessions. If only we valued people as much as objects.