I loved this memoir by Edmund De Waal, looking at his family's history through the eyes of the art that they collected and what happened to it. he is from a Jewish family in Odessa, that spread through Europe, traded in wheat and made wealth, then expanded their influence through banking and marriage to reach the heights of a society that money could buy, only to plunge during WWII.
He opens with a description of a collection of 264 netsuke that he has inherited, but were bought in the mid-1800's after perry opened Japan up to trade, and there was a European obession with all things Japanese. These small but exquisitely rendered toggles were part of Charles Ephrussi's art collection, and were palmed and handled by many well-known painters and writers of Charles's time--they were displayed prominently in his home for a time, and the author speculates about the role of the netsuke as the great impressionist painters rolled through Paris, and Charles began to collect their works as well.
Charles gives the nemsuke to his cousin Viktor in 1899 as a wedding present, and they left Paris for Vienna. The author thinks that the roccoco grandeur of Vienna might not have been well suited to the finely carved, weightless, and often unimpressive at first glance nemsuke, but they held a place of prominence there.
The story is nicely woven so that at the point when the Nazi's come and rampage through the Jewish community, destroying or stealing everything in their wake, we are emotionally invested in what happens to these small objet d'art. It is always painful to read accoutns of the atrocities that families endured, but this is a very unique, as well as hopeful way of telling that story. Wonderfully executed momoir.
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