Among the most engaging books I’ve read in the past decade or so is the ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), an account of his family’s astonishing history. Until the rise of National Socialism and the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, the Ephrussis were as rich, influential, and respected a Jewish clan as the Rothschilds, known for both their affluence and their philanthropy. (The families intermarried in the 1880s.) De Waal’s book is an informally told saga of wealth, power, persecution, and loss, peopled by bankers and the occasional aesthete. It spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing everything from luxury and high social status to Nazi brutality, and moves across Europe to the Far East and back. The connecting thread is the journey of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke—palm-sized carvings used from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century as toggles, to fasten a small container to the sash of a man’s kimono. De Waal traces the history of the collection from its acquisition by a distant cousin in Paris, at the height of the nineteenth-century rage for Japonaiserie, to his own inheriting them from a great uncle, introducing us to members of his family along the way. Now an idiosyncratic exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, a variation of one seen earlier in Vienna, takes up the tale. Like de Waal’s book, “The Hare with Amber Eyes” centers on the alluring miniature sculptures and creates a context for