The Effingers: Pushkin Press Classics

Gabriele Tergit (1894–1982), born Elise Hirschmann, was a German novelist and reporter. She began writing newspaper articles in the early 1920s under her pseudonym and eventually rose to prominence at the Berliner Tageblatt as one of Berlin's best-known court reporters. Her first novel, Käsebier Takes Berlin (available from NYRB Classics) cemented her reputation as a brilliant social satirist of the Weimar Republic. In 1933 she narrowly evaded arrest by the Nazis, fleeing to Prague and Palestine before settling in London with her husband and son. Alongside essays and articles, she wrote a number of books of fiction and nonfiction, including two novels, unpublished in Tergit’s lifetime, that were recently published in Germany to critical acclaim: So war’s eben (That’s How It Was) and Der erste Zug nach Berlin (The First Train to Berlin).

Sophie Duvernoy is a literary translator and scholar focusing on the literature and aesthetic theory of the Weimar Republic. Her translation of Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin was published by New York Review Books in 2019 and 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.