I have taken to reading big sprawling family sagas, in response to my current disappointment with much modern fiction. Last year I discovered the Eitingons, forebears of Mary-Kay Wilmer, editor of The London Review of Books. What a family! What a story! Two sides of the Iron Curtain. Leonid, the KGB agent who oversaw the assassination of Trotsky on the one. Motty, wealthy rag trade entrepreneur in America on the other. Some of the details are frustratingly sparse – but that’s real life, you can’t make it up and Mary-Kay doesn’t try. The Russian Eitingons remain devoted to their cause to the bitter end – and it is bitter! The riches from the fur trade decline. Motivations and beliefs in America are harder to discern – but then Motty was avoiding the reaches of McCarthyism, best to be obscure about these things. On the side there are links to Freud and the rich cultural life of Europe pre WWII. All up a fascinating read.
There are some similarities between Mary-Kay’s family and that of Edmund de Waal, a potter who has taken an exotic after-dinner tale and turned it into a wonderful memoir, A Hare With Amber Eyes. I read it on my iPad and don’t have an image of the book. I’ve not seen the hardback in Australian shops and this saga deserves a hardback if you eschew electronic reading. The paperback is now available.
In the absence of the book here are images of it’s central motif which is the fate of a collection of these perfectly crafted Netsuke. The thirteenth image on page three of these images resembles the Ephrussi hare.
Like Mary-Kay’s family the founder of the dynasty comes from central Europe in territory that changes hands over the course of the century. Russia and the Austro- Hungarian Empire feature strongly in both histories. The Ephrussi started outside Odessa. Like the Eitingons the source of the subsequent fortune was furs. But the Euphrussi shifted pretty quickly to high finance. Both families end up in Austria which is where the Ephrussi find themselves at the start of WWII and lose everything, but not their lives and not their 264 netsuke. Some grim reading there, but before that, what characters! What lives!
Charles in Paris, the model for Proust’s Swann in Remembrance of Things Pastand the man in the top hat in Renoir’s luncheon of the Boating Party. It was he who acquired the netsuke in 1874. And he who passed them on to Emmy on her wedding day. She kept them in her dressing room where her children played with them as they watched her dress for the balls, parties, operas, theatre performances that were her life.
Those children playing with the netsuke were her daughter Elisabeth, the author’s grandmother who scorned the frivolity of fashion for poetry and the law. She corresponded with Rilke and, in 1924, became the first woman to receive a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna. And her son, Ignace (Iggy) the author’s great-uncle whose life trajectory encompassed banking before escape to couture in Paris, designing cruise wear in Hollywood, US army Intelligence Officer during the Normandy invasion and finally businessman in Japan. It was he who took the netsuke back to where they were made and cared for them before ensuring they were passed on, finally, to the author. After they had been saved, they alone of all the wealth and possessions of the family Euphrassi from the great house on Vienna’s Ringstrasse.
The author takes us to all these places – Odessa, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo – and evokes the different times and lives of his fascinating forebears, interspersing just enough of his own impressions and cares. The result is a beautifully realised celebration of the lives of some extraordinary people. I am glad Edmund de Waal took the advice of those dinner party friends who told him his tale should be committed to writing.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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