Letters to Camondo

Edmund de Waal, "an artist who writes," is a British ceramicist who wrote a memoir in 2010, The Hare with Amber Eyes, about the story behind a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke (small, intricately carved figures) — which ended up to be a story of his family, the Ephrussi family, a Jewish banking dynasty, and their demise in the Holocaust. His newest, "Letters to Camondo," is similar in themes — the legacy of a prominent Jewish family, their relationship with art, and the decimation caused by the Holocaust all weave throughout — and just as magnificent. Through 58 letters, de Waal writes to Count Moïse de Camondo, a Sephardic Jewish collector and philanthropist who lived in Paris after his family moved from the Ottoman Empire. After his death, he donated his home to Paris as a museum (Musée Nissim de Camondo), where de Waal spent a year.

“In the silence of lockdown last year, I began writing a series of letters to Moïse de Camondo. I knew his house in the Rue de Monceau in Paris, had spent time in those golden rooms and in the archives high up in the attics. I needed to talk to him about memory and what it means to make a memorial for someone you love, about families and collecting things and keeping them together," de Waal explained. Within — a memorial to a Jewish intellectual family lost to history, a moving story touching on themes of of assimilation and antisemitism and Jewish identity.

It’s a slim memoir, but one of the best books I’ve read this year, hands down. I loved how he included photographs, art, maps, and so much more — you can feel de Waal’s searching for meaning in what Camondo left behind, and in the murders of his daughter and grandchildren in Auschwitz. “People slip into art and are lost,” he writes, but he does a magnificent job of trying to find them.

Rating: ★★★★★