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 soon rise to prominence as one of the most important German industrialist families in Berlin. With the outbreak of World War I, however, 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.

Duvernoy will discuss Tergit and her underrated masterpiece—woefully underrated when it first appeared in 1951, and only recently rediscovered in Germany—with Noah Isenberg.