Culture

The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss BY Edmund de Waal. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hardcover, 368 pages. $26.
Cover of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

In 1943, Hannah Arendt reviewed the memoirs of Stefan Zweig, one of the leading literary figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Like the vast majority of those figures—the playwrights and journalists, psychoanalysts and art collectors who made the Austro-Hungarian capital perhaps the most sophisticated city in the world—Zweig was Jewish. But this Jewish golden age was always haunted by the pervasive anti-Semitism of Austrian society, and it ended, of course, in catastrophe.