The Hare with Amber Eyes

I have come back home on Monday, as per my hopes rather than expectations and realised that coming back to my normal form is going to take same time. I always liked to take it slow to study, reflect, organise few things. This is what I have been doing with some pleasure. Have I reorganised my filing cabinet? No, not yet, but my fridge is in perfect condition now. I even got some fresh food into it. I am learning to be an older person not in the best of forms but I hope it will change for the better again.

The netsuke which is the subject of the book

                                           

As I mentioned in my previous post, The Hare with Amber Eyes made a big impression on me. Still does and it has inspired me to start writing something longer than my posts. A book? Maybe, but what is important to me is that I started writing and I know what I want to write about. Writing for myself, even if I may publish some of it on a blog hoping for a feedback.

I got inspired by the inscription in the book that suddenly took all my literary interests:

Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t  grasp…Well, now that I am a little too weary to live with other people, these old feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me – it’s the mania of all collectors – very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing. And of this collection to which I ‘m now more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather like Mazarin said of his books, but in fact without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.         

Charles Swann

Marcel Proust , Cities of the Plain

I have been reading In the Research of Lost Time for many years and even if I have not finished it yet, the last time I stopped reading it was few years ago and I was in the middle of the part seven. Even if I have not formally completed the book I have read most of it and some parts more than once. I think I will always continue reading it. It does not seem to be a book I am ever going to tick off as read and forget about it. It will always hold fascination for me.

The Hare with Amber Eyes is about a netsuke collection initially purchased by Charles Ephrussi a Jewish-French art critic, historian and collector who was an inspiration for Marcel Proust’s character of Charles Swann. The collection was passed in the family and the book tells the story of the collection and the times from middle of the XIXth century to the current times. The Ephrussi were a Russian Jewish banking and oil dynasty extremely influential and rich till the Hitler times. They lived and operated within two centres one in Paris and one in Vienna. The family were known for their connoisseurship, intellectual interests, and their huge collections of art.

Ephrussi palace at Rue Monceau, I must have passed it many times all those years ago 

                                                

Reading the first part of the book about Charles Ephrussi’s life many memories of my own time in Paris came back with a considerable force. Ephrussis lived in a palace at Rue Monceau and the Monceau park is mentioned many times in the book. This was the park I walked to quite often to stroll or sit read for a while. Even if I did not know the word then, I was doing a lot of flaneuring in Paris. They were such good times…

That is how I remember the park

Jews always created strong and mainly negative feelings among many nations. I often wondered why this particular group of people distinguishes itself in such a way that the big part of the world could not accept or even tolerate them. The book partly answers the question saying that this may be their superiority on many fronts that is the cause of envy, rejection and attacks. My thoughts are not clear yet, but I always have been on the side of Jews and ashamed of Polish anti-Semitism. I think that I need to revise this Polish guilt complex as the whole world is anti-Semitic at times.

This is a great book to read while I am recovering from my hospital experience and adjusting to the new health situation. A little bit like the old times when I was a girl who each year suffered long lasting colds staying in bed for a couple of weeks to cure a head cold usually followed by a bronchitis. I liked the recovery time as it was my time and I used it mainly for reading. I also liked the attention of my usually busy mother who spent more time with a sick daughter than the healthy one. It payed off to be sick those days. Not so much now so I better move through this stage quickly.