On a chilly morning in late February 2022, my friend Valerie and l boarded a train from our homes in Maryland for the three hour trip to New York City.
We were headed to the Jewish Museum to see an exhibition based on the book, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal. We had both read this family memoir and loved it, but the book has a special meaning for me. For the last few years, with much support from Valerie and others, I’ve been researching and writing about my own hidden inheritance in Europe, and how it and its creators were affected by World War II.
We arrived in New York at 11:30 am and were met at the brand-new Moynihan Station by Valerie’s sister Kathleen who lives in Manhattan. What a pleasure to step onto the escalator from the dim train tracks and be transported up into this airy, glass-ceilinged modern structure from which you can see the sky and buildings around you. Such a contrast with the old and cramped underground Penn Station! And to view Kathleen’s welcoming face at the top of the stairs was another happy moment. We were all masked against Covid, of course, but her smiling eyes said everything. She was as eager as we were to get started on our adventure.
Our tickets for the exhibition were for 1:30 pm so we decided to first fortify ourselves with lunch. Under Kathleen’s guidance, we took a bus up to 86th Street and another across Central Park to Fifth Avenue where we dined in cozy elegance at the Neue Galerie’s Café Sabarsky. (The restaurant required customers to show proof of vaccination and the wait staff wore masks, so we decided to risk eating there. Too tempting to forego.) The Neue Galerie exhibits early twentieth century German and Austrian art, and the cafe specializes in Viennese dishes and desserts. In fact, it reminds me of home. My mother was born in Vienna, and she made things you can order at the café such as Wiener schnitzel with lingonberries, beef goulash with spaetzle (tiny dumplings), hazelnut cake,
and “zachertorte mit schlag” (a Viennese chocolate cake served with whipped cream).
After lunch (we saved dessert for the closing act of the day), we walked the few blocks up Fifth Avenue to the Jewish Museum. The café was an apt as well as a convenient choice, for Vienna plays a large role in The Hare with Amber Eyes. In the book, Mr. de Waal, a noted English ceramicist and writer, describes his journey across Europe and Asia to uncover the story of his illustrious Jewish family, the Ephrussis. This family had acquired great wealth, property, and influence before losing everything in World War II. On March 12, 1938, the day Nazi Germany annexed Austria, his great grandparents Victor and Emmy Ephrussi and the youngest of their three grown children were living in their magnificent home in Vienna on the Ringstrasse (the boulevard that circles the city). They were soon forced to flee, but not before the Nazis stole or destroyed almost everything in the house.
Despite these dramatic events, the central character of the book is not any one person, time, or location, but a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke acquired in the late 1800s in Paris by Victor’s cousin Charles Ephrussi. The netsuke are tiny and exquisite representations of humans, animals, and inanimate things made of ivory or wood that Charles gifted to Victor and Emmy when they married in 1899. Emmy displayed the collection in a vitrine (glass cabinet) in her dressing room and allowed her three children—the oldest of whom was Mr. de Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth—to play with these small but mesmerizing objects in the evenings as she was dressing to go out.
Miraculously, the netsuke were saved from the Nazis in 1938 by Emmy’s quick-witted and resourceful maid, Anna, who had stayed behind after the family left. She managed to pocket them a few at a time so as not to arouse attention while the house was being ransacked, and then hid them until the war was over. The dramatic story of this extravagant symbol of human enterprise and creativity parallels the tumultuous lives of de Waal’s ancestors and propels the story along its fateful path.
In collaboration with an architectural firm, the museum recreated some of the rooms in which the events in the book take place. The rooms were decorated with fine paintings and furniture, historical photographs, and other ephemera belonging to the Ephrussis. A large portion of the netsuke collection was also displayed. In the midst of it all, the author was heard via speakers in various locations of the exhibit, reading different excerpts from his book. His voice was careful and tender in its enunciation of his text, and his presence added to the sense of intimacy and immediacy I experienced as we toured the rooms and revisited the story.
One of the photographs in the exhibit particularly haunts me. It was taken on March 15, 1938, three days after the Anschluss, and shows German troops and tanks parading in overwhelming force on a large expanse of the Ringstrasse, surrounded by huge crowds.
My mother, age fourteen, and her parents, younger brother, and grandmother were still living in Vienna at that time. Shortly afterwards, she and her brother were taken out of their classes and placed in one for Jews only, and her parents were among those who were made to scrub the streets on their knees with a toothbrush. One day when she and her mother were walking home, they were detained at Gestapo headquarters and her mother was forced to wash dishes before they were released. When the family’s maid announced she was quitting because she could no longer work for Jews, she spat on the floor of their apartment before leaving. There are maids and there are maids…
Fortunately, my mother and her family were some of the lucky ones, for they eventually escaped the war, arriving in the U.S. on December 8, 1941.
As the museum’s press release noted, the exhibition brought together “… pieces from the Ephrussi’s collections to examine… (how) objects can function as storytellers, symbols of resilience, and monuments of a family legacy…” (italics mine)
I would add… and reminders of the lessons of the past for us now who face similar dangers.
Soon after the book was published in 2010, I inherited a deeply resonant object of my own: a Bauhaus-style apartment building in my father’s birthplace of Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). The building was commissioned in 1937 by his Jewish parents Alfred and Rosa Neumann, who were forced to flee their homeland in 1939 only months after it was completed. They got it back after the war but left again in 1948 when the Communists took over the government. The apartment house then stayed hidden for decades behind the Iron Curtain until the 1990s when Czechoslovakia regained its democracy and my father was able to reclaim it.
Like the netsuke, this apartment building is a survivor and a symbol of continuity. Unlike the netsuke, it cannot travel. It still stands on the street where my father was born and where my grandparents lived and worked from the day they moved to Brno as young marrieds in 1913. Except for the tombstones of my father’s ancestors that dot the ancient Jewish cemeteries throughout Moravia and Bohemia, this house is the last overtly visible presence of his family in the Czech lands.
Objects left behind lead to questions. Here are some I keep wondering about:
Why did my grandparents make such a massive investment in their country as the Germans were closing in?
What did the apartment building mean to them?
How did they choose their architect and builder?
Why did they wait so long to leave Czechoslovakia and how did they finally get out?
Why did they return after the war given the terrible fates there of close family members who stayed behind?
What was it like to leave for the last time in 1948, after the Communists nationalized all private properties and signaled ongoing persecution of the Jews?
Did they still love their country as much then as they had before?
After touring the exhibit which raised its own questions about the human spirit, Valerie, Kathleen, and I walked slowly back down Fifth Avenue and settled in a booth at the Café Sabarsky where we ordered desserts and coffee. We were eager to compare our thoughts in the comforting warmth of this wood-paneled room with its tall windows that overlooked the busy street and the park beyond, all now bathed in a wintry light. My head was filled to bursting. The magic of The Hare with Amber Eyes is not just how beautifully crafted, researched, and written it is, but how deeply felt.
My late friend Kay Kriegsman, who first recommended the book to me and understood all that my grandparents’ apartment building represented, called our story “Little Hare.”
Another tale of lost and found.
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de Waal, E. (2010). The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
https://thejewishmuseum.org/press/press-release/hare-with-amber-eyes-announcement
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