Letters to Camondo

Camondo is a family of Jewish financiers from Constantinople, nicknamed "the Rothschilds of the East". In the 1870s, having settled in Paris, they became philanthropists, art collectors, and indispensable figures in high society. And favorite targets of anti-Semites. In Paris, Moïse de Camondo built a magnificent mansion and filled it with works of art. His collection became one of the largest assemblages of French art of the 19th century. Both the house and the collection Moïse bequeathed to France in memory of his son Nissim, who was killed in the war in 1917. The entire Camondo family perished in the Holocaust.

Edmund de Waal, a renowned ceramic artist, is well known to the Russian reader for his deeply personal and extraordinary story "The Hare with Amber Eyes," in which he traces the fate of his ancestors, the Ephrussis, closely linked to Camondo. The book, composed of fictional letters to Moïse, was written by de Waal after his exhibition at the Camondo Museum. These fifty letters are not only the history of the Camondo family in Paris but also reflections on assimilation, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.