Art Review: ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’ at New York’s Jewish Museum

First published in 2010, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is partly history, partly an art story, partly a family memoir, and partly de Waal’s autobiography. Now this poignant, lyrical book is an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. At its best, the book and the show — probing the rise, fall, and metamorphosis of a Jewish family, the Ephrussis — are about inheritance. De Waal calls himself an “odd, unsettled mixture,” as are we all. The past, and that’s mostly our families and their times, makes us. And then we make choices and remake ourselves in the context of our own zeitgeist. Though the exhibition is mostly an illustrated summary of the book, it’s beautifully presented. De Waal’s story is well worth a revisit.

The Ephrussi story starts in the shtetl, among peasants, one of whom moved to Odessa and built a business selling wheat. Newly rich in the 1850s as big Russian grain brokers, the Ephrussis got richer still from banking, first in Vienna, the financial and cultural capital of Central Europe, and then in Paris. The family, or de Waal’s branch of it, lost it all by the late 1930s through Nazi theft. Spared from death in the Holocaust, they scattered, rebuilt, and rediscovered their heritage.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

First published in 2010, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is partly history, partly an art story, partly a family memoir, and partly de Waal’s autobiography. Now this poignant, lyrical book is an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. At its best, the book and the show — probing the rise, fall, and metamorphosis of a Jewish family, the Ephrussis — are about inheritance. De Waal calls himself an “odd, unsettled mixture,” as are we all. The past, and that’s mostly our families and their times, makes us. And then we make choices and remake ourselves in the context of our own zeitgeist. Though the exhibition is mostly an illustrated summary of the book, it’s beautifully presented. De Waal’s story is well worth a revisit.

The Ephrussi story starts in the shtetl, among peasants, one of whom moved to Odessa and built a business selling wheat. Newly rich in the 1850s as big Russian grain brokers, the Ephrussis got richer still from banking, first in Vienna, the financial and cultural capital of Central Europe, and then in Paris. The family, or de Waal’s branch of it, lost it all by the late 1930s through Nazi theft. Spared from death in the Holocaust, they scattered, rebuilt, and rediscovered their heritage.