It is not the Ephrussi empires he focuses on, not the making of great fortunes, but on their spending. At one level he writes in vivid detail of how the fortunes were used to establish the Ephrussis’ lavish lives and high positions in Paris and Vienna society. And, as Jews, of their vulnerability: the Paris family shaken by turn-of-the century anti-Semitism surging out of the Dreyfus affair; the Vienna branch utterly destroyed in Hitler’s 1937 Anschluss.
At a deeper level, though, “Hare’’ is about something more, just as Marcel Proust’s masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As with “Remembrance of Things Past,’’ it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony.
For de Waal, art is the purest expression of these interiors. As a ceramicist, his art has lodged in the making of objects to be collected. So to say that de Waal explores the collections of three of his forebears — his great-great-uncle Viktor in Vienna, Viktor’s son Iggie, a wanderer who settled in Japan, and Viktor’s cousin Charles in Paris — is to speak of something besides things; rather, of Virgil’s the tears in things.
De Waal’s is search more than research, though he does indeed ransack libraries, family diaries, and collections of letters. The two years he spent have the quality of a pilgrimage. And he is possessed of a talisman resembling the scallop shells borne by the medieval religious processions to Santiago de Compostela: 264 ancient netsuke, tiny figurines exquisitely carved by Japanese artists. They were originally purchased by Charles Ephrussi in the 1860s, then presented as a wedding present from him to Viktor in 1899, and then left to Iggie, who shortly before his death gave them to Edmund.
