The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance: Summary & Key Insights

To understand the netsuke, I had to travel backward—to Odessa, on the Black Sea, where my ancestors began as grain merchants. There the Ephrussis built their fortune with wheat, navigating between Russia and Western Europe, weaving themselves into the texture of 19th-century commerce. The family’s ambition was relentless, pushing them westward, establishing banks in Vienna and Paris. They became the embodiment of a new cosmopolitan Jewish elite: rooted nowhere and everywhere, erecting palaces, collecting art, hosting salons.

The story of the Ephrussis is one of ascent: from traders to patrons, from periphery to the glittering center of European culture. But beneath every gleaming surface lies the question of belonging—what happens when wealth confers access but never complete acceptance? The netsuke, later acquired by Charles, are born into this paradox. They are tokens of refinement in a world that both welcomed and doubted the Ephrussis’ place within its aristocratic fold.

I found myself walking the streets of Belle Époque Paris, tracing the life of Charles Ephrussi, my distant cousin and one of the city’s foremost art connoisseurs. He was a figure of distinction and intrigue—a friend of Monet, Renoir, and Proust’s model for Swann. In his gilded apartments on Boulevard Haussmann, Charles assembled an extraordinary collection of Impressionist paintings, Japanese art, and objets d’art.

Charles’s world was one of conversation and visual delight, where art broke boundaries between Europe and the East. Amid his silks and canvases sat the netsuke, newly arrived from Japan, exquisite symbols of that cultural exchange. They were not mere ornaments, but quiet presences amid the fervor of modernity. Through Charles I saw the European fascination with Japonisme unfold: the joy of discovering intimacy in miniature, tactility in abstraction. He represented an age intoxicated with beauty, yet shadowed by social precarity, as his Jewishness always marked him apart despite his acclaim. These tensions would echo in the family’s fate, and in the fragile endurance of these small carvings.