Letters to Camondo

by Edmund de Waal

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374603496
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	766,984
File size:	67 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Edmund de Waal is an artist who has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. His bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, has won many prizes and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. The White Road, a journey into the history of porcelain, was published in 2015. He lives in London with his family.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/08/2021

A sumptuous household museum prompts a reverie on the doomed French-Jewish haute bourgeoisie in this elegiac family history. Memoirist and ceramic artist de Waal (The Hare with the Amber Eyes) addresses an epistolary monologue to Moïse de Camondo (1860–1935), a Jewish banker and collector who bequeathed to the public his palatial home in Paris, along with its art, porcelains, and antiques, in honor of his son, a pilot killed in WWI. De Waal’s detailed appreciations of the Musée Nissim de Camondo’s furnishings—“the panels that hold the decoration of birds are framed in gold so that this toucan, this mistle thrush has its own little patch of the world, a rock to sit on, a bush to sing at”—open out into a reconstruction of the lives of Camondo’s circle of related Jewish families (de Waal’s Ephrussi family forebears, who lived nearby, among them) who rose to prominence as intellectuals and patrons but became targets of anti-Semitic ideologues. (The book’s later chapters tersely recount the persecution of Moïse’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren in Nazi-occupied France and their deaths at Auschwitz.) De Waal’s elegant prose, rapt eye for aesthetics, subtle character sketches, and nuanced musings on Jewish identity yield a rich, Proustian recreation of a lost era. Photos. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"[de Waal] demonstrates, in this slim and elegant volume, how words can hold our memories as well as objects while taking up infinitely less space." —Maurice Samuels, The New York Times Book Review

“[P]art inquiry, part history, part philosophy, and wholly poignant and original.” —Robert Kanigel, Air Mail

"Superb . . . This companion study to The Hare with Amber Eyes is the skilfully told story of a family's collection of art objects . . . consistently illuminating . . . excellently illustrated . . . de Waal's excavation of the meanings of assimilation is considered, compassionate and appreciative of its costs . . . He is a wise guide to people and things that are dispersed and are collected . . . This book is a wonderful tribute to a family and to an idea." —Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian

“A slender book [that] reads like a long prose poem” —Charles Trueheart, The American Scholar

"Letters to Camondo immerses you in another age—one as sharply torn with rifts and bigotry, political uncertainty and changing fortunes as our own—but also a time of grace and the deliberate cultivation of pleasure . . . de Waal creates a dazzling picture of what it means to live graciously." —Nilanjana Roy, The Financial Times

"De Waal is a deep insider writing a series of familiar and familial letters to Moïse de Camondo, addressing him as ‘Friend’, ‘Dear friend’, ‘Monsieur’, ‘Cher Monsieur’, ‘Mon cher Monsieur’ and even ‘Monsieur le Comte’. His manner is softly prowling, whether inside or outside the house and its archives; his tone is intimate, melancholic, speculative, at times whimsical. At the end he sternly resists any idea of ‘closure’ about the disasters of 1941-45." —Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

"I was deeply moved . . . [de Waal] has found a way to meditate on exile, migration and polarization that feels painfully relevant." —Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times

"A sumptuous household museum prompts a reverie on the doomed French-Jewish haute bourgeoisie in this elegiac family history . . . De Waal’s elegant prose, rapt eye for aesthetics, subtle character sketches, and nuanced musings on Jewish identity yield a rich, Proustian recreation of a lost era." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

★ 2021-03-23
Beautifully rendered recollections of a distant world.

In 50 imaginary letters to Comte Moïse 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 Musée 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 Sèvres porcelain. De Waal lovingly evokes the luxuriant textures and glinting surfaces of a rarefied ambience of “talk and food and porcelain and politesse and civilité”; 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.

Kirkus Reviews