Effingers

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. - NYRB