The Kamondo are a family of Jewish financiers originally from Constantinople, nicknamed the “Rothschilds of the East.” In the 1870s, having settled in Paris, they became philanthropists, art collectors and indispensable characters of social life. And the favorite targets of anti-Semites. In Paris, Moses de Camondo built a magnificent mansion and filled it with works of art. His collection has become one of the largest collections of French art of the 19th century. Moses bequeathed both the house and the collection to France in memory of his son Nissim, who was killed in the war in 1917. The entire Kamondo family died in the Holocaust.Edmund de Waal, a famous ceramic artist, is well known to the Russian reader from the deeply personal and extraordinary story “The Hare with Amber Eyes”, in which he traces the fate of his ancestors, the Efrussi family, closely related to Camondo. And de Waal wrote a book made up of fictional letters to Moses after his exhibition at the Camondo Museum. These fifty letters are not only the story of the Camondo family in Paris, but also reflections on assimilation, on family, on art, on the vicissitudes of history and the value of memory.