Good Neighbors, Bad Times

by Schwartz, Mimi

• ISBN13: 9780803226401
• ISBN10: 0803226403
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Mimi Schwartz grew up on milkshakes and hamburgersand 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?

Author Biography

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). She won a Pushcart Prize for her essay “Telling the Truth that Matters.” A professor emerita at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, Schwartz teaches workshops in memoir and creative nonfiction nationwide and abroad.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xi
Author's Note	p. xiii
Close to Home
Treadmill to the Past	p. 3
Anonymous Translation	p. 8
At the Nachmittag	p. 17
Kaffeeklatsch	p. 24
Joie de Vivre	p. 35
Four Stories of the Torah	p. 48
The Revolving Room	p. 59
An Ocean Away
Off the Record	p. 75
A Little Respect, Please	p. 95
The Good Raincoat	p. 102
Hedwig, Fritz, and "Schtumpela"	p. 113
The Second Generation	p. 122
Back and Forth
Willy from Baltimore	p. 139
Five Kilometers Away	p. 151
Katherine of Dorn	p. 164
Truth Transposed	p. 175
What Willy's Neighbor Says...	p. 177
The Red Album	p. 180
Where Legend Ends	p. 193
At My Father's Grave	p. 203
End Points
The Other Miriam	p. 213
Three Little Girls	p. 221
Yes or No?	p. 234
The Celebration	p. 243
Acknowledgments	p. 259
Discussion Questions	p. 261
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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