Thought provoking
This is the story of a family told by following the fate of its' collection of small, homey Japanese carvings called netsuke. The collection is acquired in Paris in the nineteenth century by one member of this Russian Jewish family and later resides in Vienna, where it and the family are caught in the Nazi annexation of Austria. The author, a potter living in England and the inheritor of the collection from a great-uncle in Japan, eloquently describes the history behind this art form and the historical background of this tragic time and how it affected his family. The reader ... read more will come away feeling close to the main characters and thinking about the importance of certain objects passed down in families. More for a bookish reader rather than a casual one. With illustrations, but curiously with none of the netsuke. Perhaps these objects that were saved, when so many people were not, are too precious.
