Lives worthy of being told deserve to be shared in the finest style and with care for beauty. The narrative about a renowned ceramicist and a writer who probes the past, intertwining a Parisian collector and his Sephardic Jewish family during the German occupation, blends drama with precise detail. It invites readers who enjoyed the author’s earlier work to continue a journey through memory, art, and history. The connection to the author’s earlier book remains clear, and those who liked that voice will find продолжение here, as well as a fresh perspective on the same themes.
The titular Count Kamondo passed away in 1936, leaving behind letters that speak to a life pressed between opulence and danger. The family lineage ties to the Ephrussi and to the writer’s own maternal line, weaving a tale that touches on Marcel Proust and the era that shapes Belle Epoque Paris. The Kamondo family arrived from Constantinople and built a life of remarkable wealth in banking and trade. They became generous patrons of the arts, moved in high society, and earned Napoleonic titles. Their splendid houses around Parc Monceau hosted conversations, collections, and a social circle that mingled with literary figures. Yet wealth and visibility later fed bitterness and prejudice, and the era’s anti-Semitism carved a darker path through their story even as Parisian grandeur persisted.
Illustration credit: Pablo Garcia
Ten years after a celebrated work that traced a European century through a single family, the author turns attention to the Count of Camondo, a direct descendant of the Kamondo clan. The banking lineage from Constantinople, often described as the eastern equivalent of a great banking dynasty, carried a reputation of refinement and influence. The Count, who left Turkey as a child, designed a Parisian residence in 1910 that echoed eighteenth century taste. He filled the rooms with Buffon Sevres ware, Louis XVI chairs, Aubusson tapestries, ornate coffee tables, and textiles whose rhombus motifs recalled earlier regimes. Critics of the time questioned the obsession with such accumulation, labeling it a sign of nouveau riche pretension. The piece notes how anti-Semitic voices accused such collecting of vanity and excess, a pattern that recurs in their history.
The book makes no claim of a different narrative in this continuation; it repeats the recognition that anti-Semitism shadowed the era. The Ephrussi banking family, fully integrated into Belle Epoque Parisian life, moved through society with a visibility that blurred distinctions, until a tragedy of inheritance and loss marked the family. The Count’s son, Nissim, would inherit a collection of masterpieces from before the French Revolution. When Nissim died in the First World War, the collection began a new chapter as a bequest to the French state after Moïse Camondo’s passing in 1935. The Museum Nissim de Camondo opened to public admiration, drawing visitors to its gilded rooms and exquisite objects. A darker note appears in the mid-1940s when four family members were murdered in the shadow of war and deportation.
Thus, the book marries beauty with tragedy, luxury with loss. In a sequence of imagined letters to the Count titled Cher Monsieur, the author conjures a Proustian world before Nazism’s reach, a cosmopolitan microcosm that mirrors the author’s own family history. It introduces a lifetime of wooden and ivory figures and an amber-eyed rabbit, while maintaining a lightness that lets the weight of the past settle on the reader. The prose remains elegant and perceptive, inviting a reader to feel history as something personal and immediate rather than distant memory.
Letters to Camondo
Edmund de Waal
Translation by Marta Marfany
Cliff, 192 pages, 18 euros