Beautifully evocative and elegiac, a history of a family. You know it will not end well, as this family is Jewish and the history begins a few generations before WW II, but de Waal is determined to bring the family to life through his descriptions of their homes, their idiosyncrasies, and above all their passion for art.

De Waal traveled to all the places this family had lived, and did his best to walk in the spaces they walked, look out the windows they did, and endeavor to imagine their lives. It builds slowly as he paints in the family's background, and how Charles Ephrussi collected the netsuke that bind the entire narrative together, but as he moves toward 1900 there are more records, and the individuals take on shape and color and personality.

This is also the story, in a microcosm, of how Jews gained the right to do business and even own land in the latter 1800s, some (like the Ephrussi) becoming quite wealthy. The Ephrussi patriarchy had enough clout to call a halt to the latest Russian pogrom by threatening to effect the price of grain. So the pogrom was halted, but the fallout was an increase of antisemitic resentment.

But this is not just another Holocaust tale, harrowing as that might be. It is also a thoughtful, painterly, sometimes elegiac examination of how human beings relate to things, especially art things. Like the netsuke.

That sets up the scene for the painfully vivid account of Austria's fall to the Nazis, and the horrors of having your house invaded, first by angry young men with their new swastika armbands who bully their way in just to smash things and take what they want. But when the Gestapo comes, the real horror sets in, as they deliberately, with a semblance of legal exactitude, proceed to catalog everything they are stealing from this family.

The story of the netsuke binds everything together, as de Waal brings the story up to the present.

Near the end, one of his neighbors says, "Don't you think those netsuke should stay in Japan?"

No, I answer. Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters.