Effingers

The first book I finished this year—published in Germany in 1951 but recently translated into English by NYRB Classics—does two things at once. It immersed me so deeply in pre-WWII, bourgeois Jewish Berlin that each time I stopped reading I had to mentally swim back to the surface of my real life. But while down there, I was chilled by reflections of recent history in the United States. It’s a brick of a book physically, but broken into short chapters and with casualness and humor, the story breezes by. We meet four generations of two intertwined families and watch the material and personal details of their lives—as well as the zeitgeist—mutate over seven decades. It was oddly consoling to be reminded that while historical specifics never repeat, Change, and an individual’s uncertainty in the face of it, is constant. It seems that everyone, to varying degrees, has lived in unprecedented times.