"The Hare with Amber Eyes"

The World War I and II, Japan, and finally Odessa.  Aryanisation puts 抄家 during the Cultural Revolution into grim context.

• All Jules and Fanny Ephrussi’s young French footmen, careful around the porcelain and good at rowing on the lake, are called up. The Ephrussi are stuck in the wrong country.
• The French, Austrian and German cousins, Russian citizens, English aunts, all the dreaded consanguinity, all the territoriality, all that nomadic lack of love of country, is consigned to sides. How many sides can one family be on at once?
• She knows that if she wants to go to the university, then she has to pass the final examination from this school. Elisabeth has known since she was ten that she must get from this room, her schoolroom with its yellow carpet, across the Franzenring to that room, the lecture hall of the university. It is only 200 yards away – but for a girl, it might as well be a thousand miles.
• In 1915 uncle Pips is serving as an imperial liaison officer with the German high command in Berlin, where he has been instrumental in helping Rilke get a desk job away from the front.
• It is an easy stream of flowing people. But Vienna now seems to have two speeds. One is the pace of marching soldiers, children racing alongside, and the other is standstill. You notice that there are people queuing outside the shops for food, for cigarettes, for news. Everyone talks of this phenomenon of Anstellen, standing in line.
• The government debates the carrying of rucksacks. Should city dwellers be allowed to carry them? If they do, should they be searched at the rail stations?
• From every corner of the old Empire imperial civil servants with no country came to Vienna to find that whole imperial ministries to which they had sent their careful reports had closed... Vienna, with just under two million inhabitants, had gone from being the capital of an empire of fifty-two million subjects to a tiny country with six million citizens: it simply could not accommodate the cataclysm.
• ‘An entire winter of denominations and zeroes snows down from the sky. Hundreds of thousands, millions, but every flake, every thousand melts in your hand,’ wrote the Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig about the year 1919 in his novel The Post-Office Girl.
• As the citizen of a defeated power, all his assets in London and in Paris, the accounts that had been building over forty years, the office building in one city, the share of Ephrussi et Cie in another, had been confiscated under the Allied terms of the punitive settlement after the war.
• The uncounted and the unmeasured started at last to be counted very accurately. There was a huge falling away; things were so much better and fuller before. Perhaps this was when there were the very first intimations of nostalgia. I begin to think that keeping things and losing them are not polar opposites. You keep this silver snuff-box, a token for standing as second in a duel, a lifetime ago.
• Rilke had been Rodin’s amanuensis in Paris... His poems are full of epiphanies, moments when things come alive – a dancer’s first movement is the flare of a sulphur match.
• you can sense the spring. Cities often feel things in anticipation, a paleness in the light, an unexpected softness in the shadows, a gleam in the windows – a slight feeling of embarrassment of being a city…
• This is a wilde, unsanctioned Aryanisation. No sanction is needed. The sound of things breaking is the reward for waiting for so long. This night is full of these rewards.
• And on 27th April it is declared that the property at number 14 Dr Karl Lueger Ring, Vienna 1, formerly the Palais Ephrussi, has been fully Aryanised. It is one of the first to receive such an accolade.
• This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.
• Never have art historians been so useful, their opinions attended to so seriously, than in Vienna in the spring of 1938.
• A scholarly question mark is to be appended to a description of an Old Master drawing; the dimensions of a picture will be measured correctly. And while this is going on, their erstwhile owners are having their ribs broken and teeth knocked out. Jews matter less than what they once possessed.
• I look through a ledger to find Viktor, and there is an official red stamp across his first name. It reads ‘Israel’. An edict decreed that all Jews had to take new names. Someone has gone through every single name in the lists of Viennese Jews and stamped them: ‘Israel’ for the men, ‘Sara’ for the women. I am wrong. The family is not erased, but written over.
• They need enough money to pay all the inventive taxes, pay for the many punitive permits to emigrate. They need to have an assets declaration of what they owned on 27th April 1938. This is collected by the Jewish Property Declaration Office.
• This new office will show that it is possible to go in with your wealth and citizenship and depart a few hours later with only a permit to leave. People are becoming the shadow of their documents.
• Viktor has one suitcase. He is wearing the same suit Elisabeth had seen him wear to the railway station in Vienna. She notices that on his watch-chain he still carries the key to the bookcase in the library in the Palais, the bookcase of his early printed books of history.
• ... Troy. It is only then, confronted by the image of what he has lost, that Aeneas finally weeps. Sunt lacrimae rerum, Aeneas says. These are the tears of things, he reads, at the kitchen table as the boys try to finish their algebra,
• Each one of these netsuke for Anna is a resistance to the sapping of memory. Each one carried out is a resistance against the news, a story recalled, a future held on to. Here that Viennese cult of Gemütlichkeit – the easy tears over sentimental stories, the wrapping of everything in pastry and cream, the melancholy falling away from happiness, those candied pictures of servant girls and their beaux – meets a place of adamantine hardness.
• This whole solid house, inlaid and overlaid and gessoed and painted, marble and gold, was as light as a toy theatre, a run of hidden spaces behind a façade. Potemkinsche. This marble wall is scagliola, lath and plaster.
• The return of émigrés was felt to be harassment of those who had stayed.
• As this was an occupied country, everything had an acronym – opaque to both the defeated and to newcomers.
• ‘As the trees shed their leaves, Japanese shed their kimonos, one by one, to sell for food. They even devised an ironic name for their wretched existence: takenoko, after the bamboo sprout which peels, layer after layer.’
• Its clarity is due, perhaps, to the fact that Benedict had no direct experience of Japan. There is a pleasingly simple polarity in the book between the samurai sword of self-responsibility and the chrysanthemum, trained into its aesthetic shape only by means of hidden wires.
• As it is 1951, the Year of the Hare in the zodiac, you hold the netsuke made from the clearest ivory in the whole collection, and it is explained that it gleams because it is a lunar hare racing across the waves, illuminated by moonlight.
• For Iggie’s Japanese guests, they are part of a lost world, made more astringent by the bleakness of post-war life. Look, the netsuke reprove, at this wealth of time there used to be.
• Japanese families, hit with postwar taxes, were living an ‘onionskin’ existence, peeling off long-treasured art works to stay afloat.   Onionskin, bamboo shoots. They were images of vulnerability, tenderness and tears. They were also images of undressing.
• Netsuke were still to be enjoyed for all those positive attributes given to precocious children, the ability to finish, scrupulousness.
• It is a bitter thing to be compared to a child. It was made even more painful when this was publicly expressed by General MacArthur.
• In the hierarchies of knowledge, netsuke were now rather looked down on as over-skilled: they carried the slightly stale air of japonisme with them, of the marketing of Japan to the West. They were just too deft.
• ‘And,’ said Jiro, ‘I was responsible for bringing the Viennese concert for New Year to Japan for NHK. The wild reaction!
• This is not a city around a cathedral or a fortress. It is a Hellenic city of merchants and poets.
• the death of Swann and the opening of his heart like a vitrine, his taking out one memory after another.
• Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live.
• It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina.