The Effingers

Reviews / Votes

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 * Guardian * 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 * Spectator * 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 * New York Times * 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 * Irish Times * A remarkable way of rendering history... What better way of understanding history - especially social or cultural history - than reading a documentary novel like this? -- Michael Hofmann * LRB * 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 * TLS * 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 * Literary Review * 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 * Wall Street Journal * 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 * Sueddeutsche Zeitung * Amazing, courageous and significant * NDR * Anyone who reads it will accompany the characters for many decades and take some of them very much to their hearts * Berliner Zeitung * A blend of page-turner and the highest literary quality * Der Tagesspiegel * This fabulous, joyful, optimistic, and deeply sad panorama of Jewish Germany must find and retain its permanent place in the German canon -- Volker Weidermann * Literaturspiegel * Breathtaking... Gripping... Rich in beautiful details and colourful characters * Telerama * Addictive, impressive, stunning. A true masterpiece * El Confidencial *