The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

The award-winning book The Hare with Amber Eyes traces the Ephrussi family, a Jewish banking dynasty, from Odessa to Vienna to Paris, England and Tokyo through five generations. After the family had lost nearly everything in 1938-43, one English descendent unexpectedly receives all that remains of the family fortune—a collection of 264 netsuke—and commences researching its extraordinary path from Japan to the author’s Parisian ancestor, portrayed in literature by Proust, to his grandmother in Vienna, where the netsuke collection was hidden during the War, and thereafter to his great uncle, an ex-patriate in Japan, and finally to the author’s home in England. “To be handed a story as durable and exquisitely crafted as this is a rare pleasure . . . You have in your hands a masterpiece.” The Sunday Times (London).