Tiny Japanese carvings at NY Jewish Museum tell story of family’s resilience

The tiny Netsuke figurines at the heart of Edmund de Waal’s celebrated memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes are now on display

EDMUND DE WAAL believes that objects, like families, are diasporic. They start in one place and end up in another, accumulating stories.

A master ceramist who exhibits his work internationally, de Waal is the author of the 2010 award-winning bestseller “The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance,” a memoir of the flourishing and fall of his European Jewish family’s banking and fine art dynasty.

Now the subject of an exhibition that opened November 19 at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan, the book captured worldwide attention for its graceful and original storytelling, conjuring lost worlds of pre-Holocaust Europe through material objects and the stories they continue to tell.

On view at the museum are those objects: family photos, letters, mementos and art from the family’s collection, including paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Gustave Moreau and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

At the heart of the exhibit is the eponymous hare, one of a large collection of netsuke, tiny intricately carved Japanese figurines made of ivory and wood. Inherited by the author, whose Dutch-born father served as the Anglican Dean of Canterbury, the netsuke inspired his search and represent the family’s rise, rupture and resilience.

“There is this thing about tactility, about objects, about what they hold,” de Waal said in an interview from his London studio last week.

FULL STORY Tiny Japanese carvings at NY Jewish Museum tell story of Jewish family’s resilience (JTA/Times of Israel)

Photo: Edmund de Waal's bestseller 'The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance' inspired a new exhibit at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan (Tom Jamieson/JTA)