Books: "Kutchinsky's Egg" By Serena Kutchinsky

 

Kutchinsky's Egg: A Family's Story of Obsession, Love and Loss

By Serena Kutchinsky

Scribner; hardcover, 320 pages; $30.00; available today, March 31st

Serena Kutchinsky is an award-winning journalist who has held senior editorial roles at Sky News, BBC News, The Sunday Times in London, Prospect, and Newsweek. She is currently the head of news at The iPaper, and spends the summer hosting talks at festivals and traveling around the countryside in a camper van. She runs an Instagram account dedicated to the legacy of the House of Kutchinsky.

Kutchinsky's Egg is her first book, a family memoir that mixes art, obsession, and love as the author searches for the spectacular jeweled egg that consumed her father's dreams, and foretold her family's downfall.

When Serena was eleven years old, her life changed forever when her father Paul - who owned the high-end jewelry company the House of Kutchinsky - set out to create the world's largest jeweled egg, worthy of rivaling those of Faberge.

The Argyle Library Egg was astonishing, at two feet tall and made of solid gold, dripping with pink diamonds. When Paul could not find a buyer for it, the House of Kutchinsky, along with his marriage, fell apart, and he spiraled into drink and drugs.

Within a decade, Paul was dead, and with that, the egg was seized by his business partners and vanished without a trace. The mystery of what happened consumed Serena.

Serena questioned why her father risked everything for the pursuit of his intrepid dream, and where in the world his creation ended up. She set out on a search for the egg, and an elusive understanding of her late father. 

The start of the journey is in the slums of London's East End, where her great-great grandparents arrived as Jewish immigrants from Russia. It is a quest that takes Serena to the glittering, but shadowy, world of high-end jewelry, the rise and fall of a family empire, and the complex bond between a father and daughter. As would be expected with something so complex, it ends in the most unexpected of places

In this excerpt, Serena writes of Paul being interviewed on the BBC on May 2, 1990: "Who would spend seven million pounds on an egg?"

The question echoes around the TV studio. The audience is silent, uncertain how to respond. At home, fifteen million people are watching.

Terry Wogan, Britain's favorite chat show host, smiles knowingly down the lens of the camera. His brown eyes twinkle. "Seven million pounds," he repeats in his Irish brogue. "And you can't even eat it."

The audience laughs. A heckler shouts that he'd offer a fiver for it. The live band strikes up. At the back of the studio, two burly bodyguards stand silhouetted. The egg's diamond-studded shell sparkles under the bright lights.

"It was no silly goose that laid this, the world's biggest golden egg."

Wogan is dressed in his chat show best of a mismatching tweed blazer and beige chinos with a bright burgundy tie. He gestures toward the giant jeweled object, his voice infused with pantomine-style levels of excitement.

"And let's welcome the man that made it," Wogan says smoothly. "Paul Kutchinsky."

Polite applause escalates into cheers and even whoops as the tinkly show music reaches a crescendo. Two gray chairs are set up on either side of the egg. With the bodyguards hovering in the background, the studio suddenly feels more like a scene from a James Bond movie than a BBC chat show.

My father saunters out, beaming from ear to ear. His shiny new loafers glide across the studio floor, and he stretches his arm out toward Terry to steady himself. Paul might not have the celebrity status of the other guests, but he is at ease in the spotlight. With his unruly mane, slender build, and gold-rimmed glasses, he looks a bit like a mad professor.

The camera zooms in on the egg atop its golden pedastal. At two feet tall, it's the size of a small child. Its surface shimmers with thousands of pink diamonds, casting shadows across the studio floor. Its heavy gold shell is open to reveal the first of its surprises; a glittering miniature library topped by a tiny diamond clock.

Paul can feel the buzz of the whiskey he downed backstage. Packed into the greenroom alongside the crooner Engelbert Humperdinck and the champion boxer Nigel Benn - the night's star turn - he'd fell suddenly invisible and snuck off to a dressing room for a hit from his hip flask. After taking a swig, he'd closed his eyes and rested the flask against his sticky forehead.

The past few days have been a whirlwind, and the enormity of what's happening is only just sinking in. His lifelong ambition is being realized - but somehow, alongside the elation, he feels piercing darts of dread.

The egg is everywhere. On display in a museum. Splashed across the pages of national newspapers. Starring on breakfast TV. Suddenly, everyone wants to know who these London jewelers called Kutchinsky are. The press is comparing Paul with the legendary Carl Faberge, whose ornate jeweled eggs won him the patronage of Russia's last czars in the late nineteenth century. Just that morning, a letter had arrived from the Guinness Book of World Records confirming the status of Kutchinsky's egg as the world's largest jeweled egg."