Overview

Germany, 1878: young brothers Paul and Karl Effinger leave the German provinces to seek their fortune in Berlin. Ambitious and talented, they soon establish themselves as entrepreneurs and marry the daughters of high-society families. A flourishing horizon opens before them, but the Great War and the youthful rebellion of the 1920s lay waste to bourgeois certainties, and, as the generations pass, a rising antisemitism begins to shadow their bright world. With dazzling historical sweep, Gabriele Tergit tells of the family's changing fortunes within the vibrantly evoked, ever-changing metropolis of Berlin. Full of parties, drama and the most delicious gossip, The Effingers is a vibrant, monumental portrait of Germany's Jewish life, in all its richness and complexity.

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9781782279518

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Reviews

'The author has captured a vanished world for future generations' - Frankfurter Rundschau 'No other novel rescues the lost Berlin and the world of Jewish Berliners like this one. It is a work of disturbing truthfulness' - Süddeutsche Zeitung 'This marvellous, cheerful, optimistic and deeply sad panopticon of Jewish Germany must find and keep its place in the German canon' - Literaturspiegel 'Amazing, courageous and significant' - NDR

Author Information

Gabriele Tergit (1894-1982), born Elise Hirschmann, was a German novelist and reporter. She began writing newspaper articles in the early 1920s under the psuedonym Tergit and eventually became a court reporter for the Berliner Tageblatt. She rose to fame in 1931 with the success of her first novel, Käsebier Takes Berlin. In 1933 she narrowly evaded arrest by the Nazis, fleeing first to Czechoslovakia and then to Palestine before settling in London with her husband and son. There, she worked on her colossal novel of generations of German-Jewish life, The Effingers (1951), and acted as secretary of the PEN Centre for German-language writers abroad. Sophie Duvernoy has translated work by Sibylle Berg, Sabine Rennefanz, and Zora del Buono, and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Thomson Reuters, and other publications.

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