God of very small things

Even in the relatively confined space of a frontispiece, photographed flat, the netsuke exert their own form of enchantment. These “very small things” are tiny, intricate carved sculptures of wood and ivory — there is a bald, crouching beggar, a fisherman, a hare finely wrought, its flanks almost alive, its eyes matched amber.

De Waal is relatively unknown in India, but his ceramic works and installations are well-known elsewhere, and he is considered one of Britain’s most skilled ceramic artists. The collection of 264 netsuke — bibelots originally carved and made in Japan, where they were the ornamental fasteners for containers to be worn with samurai clothing — were part of his inheritance from an eccentric and beloved uncle, Iggie Ephrussi.

“How objects are handed on is all about story-telling,” De Waal writes. “I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories. What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?”

This is the doorway to an extraordinary story, told with grace, feeling and a gentle insistence on confronting the truths of the past, by a man who turns his sentences as well as he throws his pots on the wheel. The Ephrussis were European Jews, made rich by ancestors who exported grain from Russia, made influential by the opulence and financial energy of a new Europe. The man who started the collection, Charles Ephrussi, was a bon vivant, caricatured lovingly by the famous artists of the day, captured in a formal hat in one of Renoir’s greatest paintings, used as the model for Swann in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

There is the well-known story of how Ephrussi buys Manet’s A Bunch of Asparagus for 800 francs, but sends the painter 1,000 francs; in a short while, Manet sends back a painting of a single stalk of asparagus to Ephrussi, accompanied by a note: “There was one missing from your bunch.” And running alongside the pleasant account of Charles Ephrussi’s rise to fame and position is also an account of the strong streak of anti-Semitism in Europe: Edmund de Goncourt complains, after Charles scores yet another social success, that the salons of Paris are now “infested with Jews and Jewesses”.

Ephrussi’s collection of netsuke (defined with admirable brevity by de Waal as “a very big collection of very small objects”) happens at the peak of the continent’s flirtation with Japan, a fascination for the objets d’art and bibelots of the mystic, exotic East. When he gives his collection away to his cousin Viktor as a wedding present, the story shifts to Vienna, where, as de Waal observes, “the flavour of anti-Semitism was different from Parisian anti-Semitism”. In Vienna, a Jew was more likely to hear cries of ‘Juden hinaus! (Jews out!)”, or to suffer a direct physical attack.

This is the point at which the story of the Ephrussi family — beguiling in its descriptions of wealth, collecting, connoisseurship, and for the window into the salons of Vienna and Paris — is overtaken by Europe’s dark history. What De Waal wants to know is how this collection of objects survives, when so many people, so many Jewish families, did not; and while that story is fascinating in itself, it is not just the tale of the survival of a collection of beautiful things that draws him in. “I am writing a book about memory haunted by Proust,” he says elsewhere, and he has also, in The Hare With Amber Eyes, written a book that goes beyond nostalgia. What survives, and what is important to us about our family histories? The question haunts him, and as we get to know the Ephrussis better, as he takes us into the dark, destructive heart of anti-Semitism and the careful nurturing of historic hatreds, it will haunt the reader, too.

In Paris, he tracks the obssessiveness of the collector, the delights of living in a world where beauty is being created everywhere, and where it can drown out the ugliness of prejudice, for a brief while. In Vienna, he takes us through the shattering of security, matched by the need to safeguard what little remains of a once stable past. In Tokyo, de Waal explores the meaning of “takenoko”, where, as he writes, “you sell first one layer of your possessions, then another, like an onion skin, just to survive”.

The true brilliance of The Hare With Amber Eyes lies not just in the gripping story De Waal has to tell, or the exquisite precision of his prose, but his honesty. He uses his research to imagine, but he never invents; and by respecting the limits of any investigation into the past, he recreates it with far more accuracy than if he had invented it. Writing of his work as a potter, of the way in which he understands how small objects displace a part of the world around them, de Waal explains: “How objects get handled, used and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question.”

The Hare With Amber Eyes is his answer, and it is one of the most moving, and most haunting, non-fiction books that you will read this year.

THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES
Edmund de Waal,
Random House India
Permanent Black
288 pages; Rs 399