Translator Sophie Duvernoy in Conversation With Alexander Wells, celebrating Sophie's new translation of Gabriele Tergit's 'The Effingers': A Berlin Saga
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An engrossing, monumental epic of German-Jewish life in Berlin over four generations - a landmark book in English for the first time
Germany, 1878: young brothers Paul and Karl Effinger leave the German provinces to seek their fortune in Berlin. Ambitious and talented, they soon establish themselves as entrepreneurs and marry the daughters of high-society families.
A flourishing horizon opens before them, but the Great War and the 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. Full of parties, drama and the most delicious gossip, The Effingers is a vibrant, monumental portrait of Germany's Jewish life, in all its richness and complexity.
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Sophie Duvernoy is a translator and writer specializing in the literature of the Weimar Republic. She is the English translator of Gabriele Tergit, and her translation of Käsebier Takes Berlin (NYRB/Pushkin Press) was shortlisted for the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize awarded by the Society of Authors (UK). Sophie is currently a 2023-2024 Translation Fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts (US), and working on a forthcoming translation of Tergit’s 900-page magnum opus Effingers (NYRB/Pushkin Press).