In his best seller “The Hare With Amber Eyes,” the writer and ceramicist Edmund de Waal traces the journey of his Jewish family and their art collection from the late 19th century to the 21st. The book combines history and memoir with a kind of object-oriented ontology, drawing parallels between the diaspora of Jews after World War II and the Ephrussi family’s dispersed possessions (many of them looted by the Nazis). It begins when the author inherits a collection of Japanese netsuke, palm-size carved sculptures dating from the Edo period that had been with his Ephrussi relatives for generations. “I...