
Effingers
Gabriele Tergit(Author)
NYRB Classics (Publisher)
Published on 11. November 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
864 pages
978-1-68137-979-1 (ISBN)
Description
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, at once epic and intimate, about the lives and fates of three generations of a German Jewish family. Beginning in 1878 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 navigate the tumultuous changes of the Weimar Republic.
Full of parties and drama and delicious gossip, and featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of characters, Effingers is a keenly observed account of German Jewish life in all its richness and complexity. Tergit's precise and limpid prose dazzles in Sophie Duvernoy's elegant translation.
Woefully underrated when it first appeared in 1951, and only recently rediscovered in Germany, Effingers is a meditation on identity and nationality that establishes Tergit as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century.
Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers is a novel, at once epic and intimate, about the lives and fates of three generations of a German Jewish family. Beginning in 1878 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 navigate the tumultuous changes of the Weimar Republic.
Full of parties and drama and delicious gossip, and featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of characters, Effingers is a keenly observed account of German Jewish life in all its richness and complexity. Tergit's precise and limpid prose dazzles in Sophie Duvernoy's elegant translation.
Woefully underrated when it first appeared in 1951, and only recently rediscovered in Germany, Effingers is a meditation on identity and nationality that establishes Tergit as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
New York Review Books
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 130 mm
Thickness: 50 mm
Weight
826 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-68137-979-1 (9781681379791)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Persons
Gabriele Tergit, translated from the German by Sophie Duvernoy