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6:30 PM

Gabriele Tergit's Effingers

Reading & Conversation|Translator Sophie Duvernoy in conversation with Noah Isenberg

  • Goethe-Institut New York, New York, NY

  • English
  • Free
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Effingers square Sophie Duvernoy © KWI

NYRB Effingers Sophie Duvernoy © KWI | NYRB | Noah Isenberg © Lizzie Chen

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.

This event is co-sponsored and presented by New York Review Books, Deutsches Haus at NYU, and the Goethe-Institut New York.
 

Panelists

Sophie Duvernoy

Translator

Sophie Duvernoy translated Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin which was shortlisted for the 2021 Schlegel-Tieck translation prize. She is co-editor of Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film, and her writing and translations have appeared in Modern Language Notes, the Paris Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Man’s Land, and The Offing.  
 

Noah Isenberg

Moderator

Film historian Noah Isenberg holds the Charles Sapp Centennial Professorship at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, he serves as Executive Director of the University of Texas’s two study-away programs in Los Angeles and in NYC, where he is based. He is the author of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, and, as editor, Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. In 2016, his introduction to the reissue of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Grand Hotel appeared from New York Review of Books Classics. 

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