Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal

I have never had the pleasure of seeing the work of ceramic artist Edmund de Waal in person, but while reading his latest book ‘Letters to Camondo’, with its slow, deliberate, beautiful prose, its sensibility and sensitivity to people, places and subject matter, I couldn’t help but think that this must be the way de Waal works as he sits at his wheel, reflecting, creating.

‘Letters to Camondo’ tells the story of Count Moïse de Camondo, born in Constantinople in 1860, and moved to Paris at a young age. This is the story of a man and his vast art collection; the story of the house he built and the life he lived in fin de siecle Paris, a time of “talk and food and porcelain and politesse and civilité and everything possible.”

It is also the story of a man who loses his only son in World War I and decides to memorialize him by dedicating his home and his collection to him. Finally, and just like de Waal’s first book, ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’, this is also the story of the treatment of the European Jews.

In gratitude to what Moïse de Camondo believes France has done for the Jewish people, he turns his home into a museum and donates it and the collection to the French state, only to see the French government repay his generosity by sending his daughter and her family to their deaths in concentration camps in 1942. 

The book is beautifully written as imaginary letters from de Waal to Camondo; letters that are based on extensive research and a wealth of information stored at and by Camondo himself. The letters are interspersed by lovely photographs of the house, the family and collection and the telling of life in the company of Proust, Manet and Renoir and deftly juxtaposed with the register-like chronicling of the events and treatment of the Jewish families in Paris from 1936 to Beatrice’s death in Auschwitz in1945 at the age of fifty. 

While the book can absolutely be read on its own, it is beneficial to have read de Waal’s wonderful first memoir ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’ as it sets the scene and creates an extra framework for truly appreciating the book.

‘Letters to Camondo’ is a wonderful meditation on memory, beauty, collection and dispersement, subjects that de Waal often reflects upon in his pottery. Later this year, De Waal will be the first living artist to have his work displayed at the Musée Nissim de Camondo. What an experience it would be to see these works in this extraordinary building with its extraordinary history.

Happy Reading!

Isabella

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