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I read poetry all the time.” He recently created a poetry library for a cancer support center in England and will roll out the idea across the country. He shifts his computer screen and points to a large installation on a wall nearby, with porcelain vessels arranged in a vitrine, based around a poem by Paul Celan.ĭe Waal speaks poetically and sparely, like his prose and like his art.
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“Just because they have died doesn’t mean that you’re not still in conversation,” he said.īehind him in the studio are neatly arranged shelves of many books, and during a Zoom call he points out a few volumes of Rilke’s poetry that belonged to his grandmother and that will not be in the show. He says that he keeps talking to those who have passed. There are things that I first saw 40 years ago in my uncle’s apartment in Japan, or 50 years ago in my grandmother’s house.” For me it’s incredibly painful and poignant. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she worked on the project to bring the memoir off the page, for 10 years along with de Waal.Īsked to imagine what it will be like to present in The Jewish Museum, with so many objects he has seen before now assembled in one place, de Waal says, “It’s an extraordinary, beautiful, lyrical thing to see something again with fresh eyes. There’s also a 1978 portrait of de Waal’s father, Victor de Waal, which the author says looks rabbinic.Įlizabeth Diller of Diller, Scofido + Renfro designed the exhibition. (Donated to the Stadttempel, Vienna, by Hermann TodescoCollection of the Jüdisches Museum Wien/via JTA)Īmong the netsuke are a persimmon with a ladybird, a snake on a lotus leaf, three mice playing and a monkey eating a peach. Visitors to the exhibit will be able to hear de Waal reading from the memoir on an audio guide as they discover the netsuke as well as other objects.Ī silk damask Torah parochet (curtain) was made from the wedding dress of a member of the Ephrussi family, c. “It’s about discovery… a genuine attempt at storytelling.” “The delicate process of excavation is part of the whole idea of the exhibition,” he said. He describes it as an immersive exhibition. You can’t touch them, but you can feel them,” he says. “I’m hoping the intimacy of the exhibition allows you to feel and sense that you are very close to them. Most are signed by the artists who created them. After the war, when the netsuke were rediscovered, the author’s grandmother brought them to England, and later his great-uncle brought them to Japan, where Edmund first saw and touched this “very big collection of very small objects” in 1981.Īt The Jewish Museum, the amber-eyed hare and the other miniatures, which de Waal describes as “seductively touchable” in the memoir, are behind glass. The netsuke were secretly hidden in a mattress by an aide loyal to the family. In 1938, the Nazis looted and then occupied the Ephrussis’ grand Viennese palace and family members faced persecution, exile and death. Various netsuke figurines from the de Waal Family Collection, on display at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan as part of the exhibit, ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes.’ (Jewish Museum/via JTA) In 1840, Charles Joachim Ephrussi made his way to Odessa, where he was hugely successful in the grain trade, and then to Vienna, where the family further increased their wealth, prestige and philanthropy. In the style of the memoir, the exhibition traces the history of de Waal’s paternal family, the Ephrussis, an influential Jewish family whose roots were in Berdichev, a village in the Pale of Settlement in what is now central and western Ukraine. When you are trying to tell a story which is complex, like a family story, which is about memory and emotions and things which are explained and things which are withheld - it’s about secrets and silences as much as things that are passed down.” He continued, “No stories are straightforward. If you are obsessive enough, you can work out the stories they might be telling.” I firmly believe that objects tell stories. “I honestly feel this idea that when you make something and pass it on, that there is a transference of energy and emotion and imagination. “There is this thing about tactility, about objects, about what they hold,” de Waal said in an interview from his London studio last week.