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.



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.



Only recently has a critical rediscovery in Germany established Tergit as one of the country's major authors. Now, thanks to an excellent translation by Sophie Duvernoy, The Effingers is appearing in English... A wonderfully vivid social portrait of pre-Nazi Berlin, whose party scenes are filled with meticulous descriptions of fashion, food, interior decor and gossip



A vivid chronicle of German Jewish life over the course of 70 years... Thoroughly immersive and unfolds in precise, often stark prose...Not only a sweeping panorama but also a series of captivating portraits... Tergit never loses interest in the human, and ensures we root for her compelling characters until the bitter end



Inspired by Tergit's own family history, this account of the rise and fall of a German Jewish clan has an addictive immediacy that will make you reluctant to put it down



The polyphony of voices allows a vivid sense of the city as it moves from the authoritarian rule of Bismarck to the freedom and decadence of the Weimar period, towards the advance of fascism... This far-ranging novel also reverberates with painful relevance for our time



A remarkable way of rendering history... What better way of understanding history - especially social or cultural history - than reading a documentary novel like this?



The Effingers is finally cementing its place not only as a lost masterpiece of European realism, but also as a work of inadvertent testimony... It is both an accomplished generational epic and a memorial, a celebration of German-Jewish achievement and a record of its vulnerability. If it belongs alongside Mann and Fontane, it also stands apart, insisting on the centrality of Jewish life to German history and on the heterogeneity of that life



Emphasising ordinary German-Jewish life is the novel's defining ethical achievement. The Effingers is also an aesthetic achievement...The rediscovery of Tergit's epic novel is long overdue... The Effingers will take its place as an important - and, not least, as a female - contribution to the canon of realist doorstopper



A magnificent saga of German-Jewish life from the era of Bismarck to World War II... Tergit's heart lies with her characters... Rich or poor, male or female, Jewish or not, ridiculous or wise, each voice pulses with life... A writer who held on to humane values in an inhumane world



The author has captured a vanished world for future generations



No other novel rescues the lost Berlin and the world of Jewish Berliners like this one. It is a work of disturbing truthfulness



Amazing, courageous and significant



Anyone who reads it will accompany the characters for many decades and take some of them very much to their hearts



A blend of page-turner and the highest literary quality



This fabulous, joyful, optimistic, and deeply sad panorama of Jewish Germany must find and retain its permanent place in the German canon



Breathtaking... Gripping... Rich in beautiful details and colourful characters



Addictive, impressive, stunning. A true masterpiece