The Hare With Amber Eyes
I have spent the last few years writing a very personal book. It is the biography of a collection and the biography of my family. It is the story of the ascent and decline of a Jewish dynasty, about loss and diaspora and about the survival of objects.
The collection is of 264 Japanese netsuke.
It is the common thread for the story of its three Jewish owners and the three rooms in which it was kept over a period of a hundred and forty years.
The first of the three rooms is the study in Paris in the 1870s of the art-critic Charles Ephrussi, the model of Swann in Proust, hung with Impressionist paintings by Renoir and Degas.
The second room is the dressing-room of my great-grandmother Emmy von Ephrussi in the vast Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse in Vienna.
The third room is that of her son Ignace, my great-uncle Iggie, in Tokyo in the 1970s, an apartment looking out across central Tokyo.
I am the fifth generation of the family to inherit this collection, and it is my story too.
I am a maker: I make pots.
How things are made, how they are handled and what happens to them has been central to my life for over thirty years.
So too has Japan, a place I went to when I was 17 to study pottery.
How objects embody memory - or more particularly, whether objects can hold memories - is a real question for me.
This book is my journey to the places in which this collection lived. It is my secret history of touch.
The Hare with Amber Eyes is published in the UK by Chatto and Windus and in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
In the Netherlands it is published by Mistral as Het Knoopjeskabinet. French and German editions will be published this autumn.
During the next few months I will be talking about the book.
Please come and find me at:
Sunday 30th May - 11.30am
Hay Festival
Wednesday 30th June
Daunts Bookshop, Marylebone, London
Thursday 8th July
Daiwa House, London
Saturday 10th July - 11.30am
Dartington Ways with Words Festival
Saturday 24th July
Port Eliot Festival
Sunday 29th August - 11.00am
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Saturday 18th September - 7.00pm
Woodstock Festival
Monday 20th September - 7.00pm
V&A In conversation with AS Byatt
Monday 27th September
Jewish Museum New York
Wednesday 29th September
Philips Collection, Washington, D.C
Thursday 30th September
Athenæum of Philidelphia
Sunday 3rd October
Book Passage,
Corte Madera, California
Tuesday 5th October
The Getty, L.A
