The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss-琥珀眼睛的兔子

作者：Edmund de Waal

书名：The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss《琥珀眼睛的兔子》

中文简介：The Hare with Amber Eyes《琥珀眼睛的兔子》（2010）是英国陶艺家埃德蒙·德瓦尔的一本家庭回忆录。德瓦尔讲述了他的家族，埃弗鲁西曾经是一个非常富有的欧洲犹太银行王朝，以敖德萨、维也纳和巴黎为中心，以及罗斯柴尔德家族的同龄人的故事。

英文简介：The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.

The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

The netsuke—drunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigers—were gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.

Charles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna; his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry.