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.
