The Effingers

Paul and Karl Effinger, sons of a watchmaker, leave the German provinces to seek their fortune in Berlin in 1878. Ambitious and talented, they soon establish themselves as entrepreneurs and marry the daughters of the wealthy Oppner family. A flourishing horizon opens before them, but the Great War and 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. Bursting with life and vivid characters, The Effingers is a monumental novel that bears witness to a vanished world of Berlin's Jewish life, in all its richness and complexity.