New York Review of Books Review

If you had to make a bet, a good one would be that a book about netsuke - intricate, thimble-size Japanese carvings - would not fly off the shelves. But de Waal, who inherited a collection of 264 (including the hare in his title), ingeniously puts the figurines at the heart of this elegant account of his family's survival in Nazioccupied Europe. To be fair, for inanimate objects, these netsuke have enjoyed quite a life. They first made contact with de Waal's bloodline in the 1870s, when his dilettante forebear Charles Ephrussi, the grandson of the man who established the Ephrussis as Europe's rois de blé, or "kings of grain," picked up the set most likely to impress a mistress. The netsuke should have been lost to the Nazis, who plundered and seized this Jewish family's opulent Viennese palace, where the figurines were next kept, in 1938. But when the author's grandmother returned to survey her damaged childhood home after Yalta, the family's loyal maid produced the netsuke, which she had hidden in her mattress for the duration of the war. "Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost," de Waal observes. "It is how you tell their stories that matters." Indeed. The author was apprenticed as a potter - he is now a professor of ceramics at the University of Westminster - and his aesthetic sensibility extends to language: there is much wit and dramatic instinct to relish in these pages. But the intelligence and creativity with which de Waal constructs a family history are what make this special book so supremely winning.