Three generations of German Jewish family undergo the tumult, upheaval, and brutality of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in this panoramic and skillfully nuanced family drama, rich with gossip and incident, capturing a Germany now lost to time.
Gabriele Tergit's Effingers is a novel both epic and intimate as it chronicles the lives and fates of three generations of a German Jewish family. Beginning from 1878-the year after the narrative of Buddenbrooks ends-and ending in 1948, we follow the Effingers, a family of modest craftsmen from southern Germany, who are joined through marriage to two families of high-society financiers in Berlin, the Goldschmidts and the Oppners.
The Effingers soon rise to prominence as one of the most important German industrialist families in Berlin, but with the outbreak of World War I, they fall on hard times, and must then navigate the tumultuous changes of the Weimar Republic.
Full of parties and drama and the most delicious gossip, and featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of unforgettable characters, Effingers is a vibrant and keenly observed account of German Jewish life in all its richness and complexity. Tergit's journalistic precision and limpid prose dazzle in Sophie Duvernoy's elegant, fluid translation.
Criminally underrated when it first came out in 1951, and only in recent years undergoing rediscovery, Effingers is a searching meditation on identity and nationality that establishes Tergit as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Gabriele Tergit (1894–1982), born Elise Hirschmann, was a German novelist and reporter. She began writing newspaper articles in the early 1920s under her pseudonym and eventually rose to prominence at the Berliner Tageblatt as one of Berlin's best-known court reporters. Her first novel, Käsebier Takes Berlin (available from NYRB Classics) cemented her reputation as a brilliant social satirist of the Weimar Republic. In 1933 she narrowly evaded arrest by the Nazis, fleeing to Prague and Palestine before settling in London with her husband and son. Alongside essays and articles, she wrote a number of books of fiction and nonfiction, including two novels, unpublished in Tergit's lifetime, that were recently published in Germany to critical acclaim: So war's eben (That's How It Was) and Der erste Zug nach Berlin (The First Train to Berlin).
Sophie Duvernoy is a literary translator and scholar focusing on the literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar Republic. Her translation of Gabriele Tergit's Käsebier Takes Berlin was published by New York Review Books in 2019 and shortlisted for the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck translation prize. She is co-editor of Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film, and her writing and translations have appeared in Modern Language Notes, The Paris Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Man's Land, and The Offing.
