Le Quartier Juif
There are men and women who write beautifully tuned to a different frequency. Edmund de Waal is in that group. It is an irony for the author of the most exquisite memoir you are likely to read in a long time is not a writer. He is a potter, said to be one of the best in England, and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. You could say the eye that judges a pot is also a writer’s eye and you could say a gifted Brit who studied English at Cambridge really should be able to write a compelling family story.
It is on these netsuke that de Waal hangs his tale or, rather, searches for it. Decades after he apprenticed as a potter in Japan, he has returned to research his mentor. In the afternoons, he makes pots. And, one afternoon a week, he visits his great-uncle Iggie. Iggie owns a large vitrine, in which he displays his netsuke collection. He has stories about that collection, but then he has so many tales about his family that de Waal delightedly spoons them up glorious anecdotes of hunting parties in Czechoslovakia, gypsies with dancing bears, his grandmother bringing special cakes from Vienna on the Orient Express. And Emmy pulling him from the window at breakfast to show him an autumnal tree outside the dining room window covered in goldfinches. And how when he knocked on the window and they flew, the tree was still blazing golden. I shivered when I read that last sentence you do not often read a description of real-world magic expressed so magically.
All week long, I open books, hoping for a line like that. Mostly, I get well-intentioned banality the world viewed through eyes dulled by experience. But de Waal is a visual artist; he lives to look and look hard. And, like a detective, he will keep looking until he has put the objects of his interest into a kind of order.
His interest is the collection of netsuke bought in 1870 in Paris by Charles Ephrussi, a cousin of his great-grandfather. Because his family has the means, Charles is able to exercise his considerable taste. No holding back with this collectorin the best story about Charles, he buys a still life of asparagus from Manet at a price so over-the-top that the artist sends a unique thank-you. A painting of a single stalk of asparagus, with a note, "This seems to have slipped from the bundle."
Charles in Paris a city of salons, exquisite clothes, complicated relationships. The world of Proust. It is no surprise that Charles and Marcel were friends or that the novelist based a character on him.
In Vienna, de Waal writes, there were 145,000 Jews in 1899, 71 per cent of the city’s financiers, 65 per cent of the lawyers, 59 per cent of the doctors, half the journalists. Why does he begin this chapter by telling us about the Jews when, as he notes, they were so assimilated? Oh, you know why; it just takes three-and-a-half decades for the anti-Semitism he chronicles to reach a boil. How did a book about a collection of objects take such a radical turn? And how, amid the horror, did 264 pieces of netsuke survive intact? It is up to the reader to take what meaning he or she can from this story of objects gained, lost, found.
What are objects to us? Do they change when we hold them, display them, give them value? Do they “retain the pulse of their makeup?” If we did not collect anything, how would we remember who we were?
My ancestors are dust. At most, there are a few photographs. So for me, the moral of this book is that everything matters but nothing lasts. Cherish beauty, but keep it private. And, if you are a Jew, always be prepared.
Your take will be just as personal. And you might as well accept that when you start reading. This is not a book about Japanese art objects.
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