A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de Camondo
Letters to Camondo is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de Camondo, the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in Paris, now the Musée Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art.
The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, "the Rothschilds of the East," who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle Époque high society, as well as being targets of antisemitism—much like de Waal's relations, the Ephrussi family, to whom they were connected. Moise de Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with art for his son, Nissim; after Nissim was killed in the First World War, the house was bequeathed to the French state. Eventually, the Camondos were murdered by the Nazis.
After de Waal, one of the world's greatest ceramic artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 11, 2021 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780374603496
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780374603496
- File size: 66707 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from April 15, 2021
Beautifully rendered recollections of a distant world. In 50 imaginary letters to Comte Mo�se de Camondo (1860-1935), a famed art collector and cultural benefactor, de Waal reflects on the meaning--to Camondo, to France, and to Jewish history--of the Mus�e Nissim de Camondo, which Camondo established in memory of his son, who died fighting for France in World War I. The author is related to the Camondo family "in complicated ways." As he notes, "I can draw a family tree, possibly, but it would be a spider's web" of intermarriages, with "whole branches" linking the Camondos and his own Ephrussi family, portrayed in his earlier book, The Hare With Amber Eyes. Arriving in France in 1869, both families lived near one another in a Parisian neighborhood that Jews saw as "secular, republican, tolerant, civilized"; where they felt insulated from pervasive anti-Semitism; and where they engaged in efforts "to align French and Jewish culture." Camondo built an opulent mansion and staffed it with a coterie of servants to care for his leather-bound books, curated wine cellar, gilded 18th-century French furniture, and S�vres porcelain. De Waal lovingly evokes the luxuriant textures and glinting surfaces of a rarefied ambience of "talk and food and porcelain and politesse and civilit�"; where Camondo, born in Constantinople, strived for acceptance as a Frenchman. Yet despite his considerable philanthropy and his son's sacrifice, Camondo could not escape the culture's disdain of Jews as arrivistes, "social climbers, vulgarians, upstarts, status seekers, mimics. As Jews aspiring to the veneer and polish of the gratin and failing to disguise their origins." He died before knowing how easily Vichy France complied with Nazi occupiers to rid France of Jews. More than chronicling the family's splendor and tragic end, de Waal has created a deeply hued tapestry of a lost time and a poetic meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile consolation of art. The book is beautifully illustrated with color images from the museum and family photographs. A radiant family history.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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