The weight of the past

The titular Kamondo died in 1936, so letters can only be addressed to his spirit. It also belonged to De Waal’s maternal family, the Ephrussi, and De Waal’s mother. Marcel Proust, to the opulent “haute juiverie” that flourished during the years of the Second Empire and brought the Belle Epoque to its ornate prominence. The French Revolution of 1789 liberated the Jews and gave them citizenship. The most enterprising flocked to Paris; Kamondo did so from Constantinople and proceeded to become extremely wealthy through banking and trade. They, too, became generous patrons of the arts, were accepted into high society and honored with Napoleonic titles: Moïse de Camondo was counted. They built magnificent houses around Parc Monceau, where Proust’s narrator plays with Swann’s daughter Gilberte, and filled them with works of art. Accumulated wealth would later incite anti-Semitism, but nowhere in the world during the Second Empire and Third Republic did gentry of Jewish descent flourish as much as in France.

Ten years after his book “The Rabbit with Amber Eyes”, in which he tells the history of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries through his family, de Waal turns his careful gaze to the life and times of the Count of Camondo, a descendant of Kamondo. A banking family from Constantinople known as the “Rothschilds of the East”. Kamondo, who left Turkey as a child, took it upon himself to design his magnificent house in Paris in 1910 with the 18th-century decorative art he loved so much: Buffon Sèvres tableware, Louis XVI armchairs, Aubusson chiffon tapestries, coffee tables. sewing with rhombus patterns from the old regime. French anti-Semites were followers of that feared slander. Edouard DrumontThey mocked his obsessive collecting, dismissing it as a vulgar vice of the nouveau riche.

Nothing in this story that can be considered a sequel to “The Rabbit with Amber Eyes” differs from it in terms of anti-Semitism. Like de Waal’s own ancestors, the Ephrussi banking dynasty, Moïse was so integrated into Belle Époque Parisian high society that he was virtually indistinguishable from the non-Jewish majority. His son Nissim would inherit the collection of masterpieces from before the French Revolution. However, when he died in the First World War at the age of 25, it became a monument, and after his death in 1935, Moïse bequeathed it to the French state. Museum Nissim de Camondo Since that day, it has fascinated the public with its golden rooms and beautiful objects on display. The only shadow cast over him is the murder of four family members in 1944. Eight years after the opening of the museum in 1936, the count’s daughter Beatrice de CamondoShe and her composer husband were deported to Auschwitz. Leon ReinachShe was gassed along with her two children, Fanny and Bertrand.

Therefore, beauty and drama, richness and desolation coexist in the pages of the book. In a series of imaginary letters to the Count (“Cher Monsieur…”), De Waal is tasked with conjuring up a Proustian world before the persecution of Nazism: a cultured and cosmopolitan microcosm just like the one in which his family lived. Another unforgettable story of wooden and ivory figurines and the amber-eyed rabbit. It is a seemingly light book by an elegant and intelligent author who gives the reader back the weight of the past, so that he feels it as his own.