Written in 1951 and now translated into English for the first time, this family saga by the acclaimed German author recaptures a golden age for Jewish life

In 1948, the German Jewish author Gabriele Tergit travelled to Berlin. There, in ruins, was the city in which she was born and grew up, reported on, then chronicled in fiction. Tergit had been one of the shining lights of interwar Berlin’s flourishing journalistic scene; she had also married into one of the city’s most prominent Jewish families. In 1931 her debut novel announced her as a literary phenomenon.

Then the Nazis came to power. Tergit was on an enemies list. She fled, first to Czechoslovakia, then to Palestine, and finally to London, where she lived from 1938 until her death in 1982. Never again did she call Berlin home. When she visited after the war, she found no real place in the conservative postwar German literary world – and no real audience for The Effingers, her newly completed magnum opus. A version was printed in 1951, but to little acclaim; 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.