Lovely photo of Edmund de Waal
with a neat bookshelf behind him.
Page 33 “Edmond de Goncourtwho seems to be everywhere encounters Charles” {Ephrussi, lover of Louise Cahen d’Anvers for fifteen years}, “and Louise huddling together in the back gallery of a fashionable dealer in Japanese art. He buys the netsuke with her, for her, to impress her. Together they collect Japanese lawyers, go to the Opera, to salons and endless parties.”
Page 24 “ I had inherited a collection of Japanese netsuke - 264 small, intricate and seductively touchable ivory carvings- from my beloved Jewish great-uncle Iggie Ephrussi and the compulsion to understand where they had been in my family history had taken me over. This collection started here. It was bought by your friend Charles Ephrussi and kept in a vitrine in a suite of rooms that he occupied alongside paintings by his Impressionist friends.”
Page 74 “The great vitrine in the drawing room held the hundred netsuke that Jiro had wanted to keep while he was alive. I was to take them and reunite them with the others in London.

Brieven aan Camondo is een prachtig boek van Edmund de Waal over de Joodse bankiersfamilie Camondo, die zich rond 1870 in Parijs vestigde. Moïse Camondo liet er zijn stadspaleis bouwen, dat na zijn overlijden in 1935 in vrijwel originele staat behouden is gebleven. Het is nu een museum. Edmund dwaalde wekenlang door dat huis en componeerde brieven aan Camondo, over wat hij er zag en dacht. Bij wijze van boekrecensie schreef ik een brief aan Edmund. Die vind je op mijn website https://www.rizoomes.nl/literatuur/brieven-aan-camondo-een-boekrecensie/ ( )

Others write about the physical book. I read the eBook, and it made looking up many of the references so easy. I love De Waal's writing. ( )

Tremendous. ( )

Edmund de Waal’s Letters to Camondo is an imaginative and propulsive look at assimilation, the family Camondo, and history itself. The Camondo family was “tagged as the Sephardic counterparts to the Rothschilds”. An esteemed family of philanthropists and financiers, they left Spain during the 1492 Inquisition and lived in Venice, Istanbul and finally Paris. Camondo had turned his Paris home into a museum to honor his dead son. The book, in a collection of imaginary letters to Camondo, follows de Waal as he wanders from room to room in the museum, commenting on its treasures and offering quietly profound reflections on French Jewish history. There are many photos illuminating the amazing collection of art objects and the family’s tragic history. The Camondo family were victims of the Holocaust and consequently there are no descendants today.