Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village »

Mimi Schwartz is the author of five books, including Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, available in a Bison Books edition, and Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl). Her essays have been widely anthologized and six of them have been Notables in Best American Essays. A professor emerita at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, Schwartz teaches workshops in memoir and creative nonfiction nationwide and abroad.

Mimi Schwartz grew up on milkshakes and hamburgers—and her father’s boyhood stories. She rarely took the stories seriously. What was a modern American teenager supposed to make of these accounts of a village in Germany where, according to her father, “before Hitler, everyone got along”? It was only many years later, when she heard a remarkable story of the Torah from that very village being rescued by Christians on Kristallnacht, that Schwartz began to sense what these stories might really mean. Thus began a twelve-year quest covering three continents as Schwartz sought answers in the historical records and among those who remembered that time. Welcomed into the homes of both the Jews who had fled the village fifty years earlier and the Christians who had remained, Schwartz heard countless stories about life in one small village before, during, and after Nazi times. Sometimes stories overlapped, sometimes one memory challenged another, but always they seemed to muddy the waters of easy judgment.

 

How, this book asks, do neighbors maintain a modicum of decency in such times of political extremism when fear and hatred strain the bonds of loyalty and neighborly compassion? How do we negotiate evil and remain humane when, as in the Nazi years, hate rules?

Carol Rittner

"A thoughtful, elegantly written memoir. . . . Through the author's voice, we hear the voices of a dwindling group of survivors-Jewish and Christian-whose perspective and remembering are as complex as they are insightful. This is a Holocaust memoir that is as much about then, as it is about now. Good Neighbors, Bad Times will make you smile, but it will also make you think. I highly recommend it."

-Carol Rittner, co-author of The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust

List of Illustrations     xiii
Author's Note     xv
Close to Home
Treadmill to the Past     3
Anonymous Translation     8
At the Nachmittag     17
Kaffeeklatsch     24
Joie de Vivre     35
Four Stories of the Torah     48
The Revolving Room     59
An Ocean Away
Off the Record     75
A Little Respect, Please     95
The Good Raincoat     102
Hedwig, Fritz, and "Schtumpela"     113
The Second Generation     122
Back and Forth
Willy from Baltimore     139
Five Kilometers Away     151
Katherine of Dorn     164
Truth Transposed     175
What Willy's Neighbor Says...     177
The Red Album     180
Where Legend Ends     193
At My Father's Grave     203
End Points
The Other Miriam     213
Three Little Girls     221
Yes or No?     234
The Celebration     243
Acknowledgments     259