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"One of the last masterpieces of German Jewish culture, Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” offers its own version of Tarfon: “It is upon us to begin the work. It is not upon us to complete it.” Superficially, “The Oppermanns” is a novel about the decline and fall of a bourgeois German Jewish furniture dynasty whose members are unable to countenance the rising threat of National Socialism. It is also, in a way, a novel about this phrase, which recurs in its pages like a psychological test or a trial of identity."
