General & Miscellaneous Biography, Jewish History

Good Neighbors, Bad Times

Name: Good Neighbors, Bad Times
Author: Mimi Schwartz
ISBN: 9780803217676

by Mimi Schwartz

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Overview

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?

Synopsis

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 how much these stories might mean. Thus began a twelve-year quest that covered 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 peered into family albums, ate home-baked linzertorte (almost everyone served it!), and 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. Small stories of decency are often overlooked in the wake of a larger historic narrative. Yet we need these stories to provide a moral compass, especially in times of political extremism, when fear and hatred strain the bonds of loyalty and neighborly compassion. How, this book asks, do neighbors maintain a modicum of decency in such times? How do we negotiate evil and remain humane when, as in the Nazi years, hate rules?

About the Author, Mimi Schwartz

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.

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Editorials

an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

Schwartz . . . writes beautifully; her words flow, characters are portrayed seemingly effortlessly and she makes vivid the tensions between the German generations and between those Germans who insist on remembering what others would equally insistently forget. The result is most satisfying, the tale of a woman in search of her roots who finds what she is looking for-and so much more; but the story is much larger than that. It is a vivid portrayal of good neighbors who experienced the worst of times that tested themselves and each other and that scattered fragments of the truth of that time to the four corners of the earth, seemingly waiting for one fine writer to unite them.
—-Michael Berenbaum

an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Shofar

Mimi Schwartz . . . has written a brilliant book that is 'not a Holocaust book,' not a book about the annihilation of European Jewry. And yet, if a Holocaust book should transmit how dear and how fragile every human life is-if it should transmit our infinite responsibility to one another in the light of the Nazi assault on the Infinite One-it is a Holocaust book, a Jewish book, a most human book. In any case, it is a book that should be read by all.

The Washington Times

A fascinating picture, atypical of so much written on the subject. Blessed with good antennae and a skeptical mind, Ms. Schwartz is not an innocent abroad. Never gullible or credulous, but open to the evidence of her own eyes and ears, she is an ideal guide to her father's lost world, which for so long she resisted. . . . It is a measure of her nuanced approach and refusal to settle for pat, simplistic answers that her book finds and genuinely values a rare point of light in that darkest of times without ever exaggerating its overall significance.

Kirkus Reviews

The American-born daughter of a German Jew tells the story of her father's tiny village, where charity mostly trumped hate during Hitler's reign. Schwartz (Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, 2002, etc.) compiles material from personal interviews, local archives and Holocaust literature into an eloquent and affectionate account of Benheim (a fictional name). Jews and Catholics had lived as friends in this small southwestern farming community for centuries, until Nazis from a nearby town shattered the interracial and interreligious peace by destroying the local synagogue on Kristallnacht in 1938. A number of the town's Jews had left the year before; some established a refugee community in Israel, others emigrated to America, as Schwartz's father did. Many chose to stay and were aided by their Christian neighbors; nonetheless, almost a third of Benheim's Jewish population eventually died in concentration camps. Schwartz's main concern is to distinguish between historical truth and inherited nostalgia, to find out whether Benheim really was a uniquely peaceful hamlet of loyal neighbors who rejected the Nazis's systematized stereotyping and brutality. Her final tally reveals a town in which personal decency was frequently upheld. The village's most cherished story (recounted in several versions) is of a policeman who hid the synagogue's Torah during Kristallnacht, then gave it to his Jewish neighbors to take to Israel. Wisely conceding that village life during the Holocaust wasn't always so generous, Schwartz also includes stories of Christians turning their heads so as not to see the deportations and of the Nazi-appointed mayor erecting a swastika over the village. The town contained"contradictions that refuse a neat labeling," the author acknowledges, to the chagrin of Holocaust scholars who favor more official records. As she got to know the surviving villagers, she writes, "their stories [made] my need for judgment recede." Schwartz's tone is gentle, her prose brilliantly clear and her insights keen, if not entirely new. A ruminative exploration of the murkiness of collective memory.