Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village [Hardcover]

Mimi Schwartz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2008

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?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Schwartz's (Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed) father was born in 1898, half of his native German Black Forest farming village of 1,200 was Jewish and religious. Many years later, as a secular American, he continued to revere his birthplace, where he insisted Jews and Gentiles got along beautifully despite the ugly reach of Nazism. To reconcile this paradox and to reclaim her father's village for herself, the author recorded stories of Jews and Gentiles in New York City, Germany and Israel and discovers that her father's villagers, while not overwhelmingly brave or altruistic, managed to perform small acts of kindness or defiance during the Nazi years, such as a policeman who saved two Torahs or carpenters who fixed Jewish windows after Kristallnacht. Schwartz's decision to refer to her father's village by pseudonym is a serious misstep in a book that tries to sort historical truths from fiction. Her writing is genial and lucid and her aim to understand how decent people remember a dishonorable past is worthy, but Schwartz's penchant for lobbing softball questions at her interviewees' is frustrating and her book seems more a cozy kaffeeklatsch than a rigorous historical examination. Photos.
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Review

"An eloquent and affectionate account. . . . Schwartz's tone is gentle, her prose brilliantly clear and her insights keen." --Kirkus Reviews

"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." --Martin Rubin, The Washington Times

"Schwartz's excellent presentation defies categorization. It has some elements of journalism, autobiography, history, reporting, feature writing, and literature. All these components are creatively combined to result in an eminently readable product that grips the reader's attention. Schwartz has augmented our limited capacity to comprehend the Holocaust, which is ultimately an incomprehensible phenomenon." --Morton I. Teicher, National Jewish Post & Opinion

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr (March 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803213743
• ISBN-13: 978-0803213746
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,672,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provides Valuable Insight into Jewish / Christian Relationships During WWII, April 4, 2008

By 

Patrice Fagnant-macarthur (Springfield, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village (Hardcover)

2008 marks seventy years since the tragic events of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a wave of destruction against Germany's Jews. In the space of a few hours, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses and homes were damaged or destroyed. Mimi Schwartz, author of "Good Neighbors / Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village" wasn't born yet. She would be grow up in Queens, New York, on milkshakes and hamburgers, and her father's stories of life in Germany, a life she had very little interest in. Her father grew up in Benheim (the name of the village has been changed to protect privacy), a little village of Christians and Jews in southwest Germany where according to all accounts Jews and Christians lived peacefully side by side. No allied bombs fell on Benheim during WWII so much of it is still preserved. The synagogue which was attacked during Kristallnacht is still there, now as an Evangelical Church. One can still visit the Jewish cemetery with 946 old graves.

Schwartz was in a village in Israel when she saw an old Benheim Torah and was told that "the Christians of Benheim rescued the Torah for us during Kristallnacht." That story sent her on a quest to discover all that she could about this little village, to determine if, like her father had always told her, Benheim was special in that the people there got along and would do anything to help one another.

In "Good Neighbors / Bad Times" Schwarz interviews many old Benheimers, some in Israel and some in America. She also visits Benheim several times, a village which now has no Jews. The Jews that were there either escaped in time or were killed in the concentration camps. Only two Benheimers who were interred in the concentration camps survived. The other eighty-seven were murdered. On her journey, Schwarz discovers a series of individual stories and individual perspectives which each tell part of the whole story. She discovers both the Jewish and the Gentile perspective on what happened. She struggles with knowing what everyone knows now versus what people knew then. There was a large swastika that had been erected in the town in 1934, but as one Benheimer stated, "It was not important; no one knew what it would mean." She learned of other kind deeds that occurred in Benheim and of a second Torah that was saved and is now located in Burlington, Vermont. She learned of how good people struggled to live through such difficult times, of people too scared to take a stand and the punishments that came to those who did. She learned of children being indoctrinated with hate in the local school and parents who struggled to fight against it.

"Good Neighbors / Bad Times" is a valuable work of social history. It is so important to preserve the stories of those who lived through these tragic events. In the end, Schwartz decides that Benheim was special, that decency managed to prevail there despite the Nazi hate that infected the land. As Schwartz states, "decency is often such a solitary act; it's evil that draws a noisy crowd." "Good Neighbors / bad Times" is recommended for anyone who wants to learn more about Jewish / Christian relationships during the World War II era. It would also make a wonderful text for a college course on the topic.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Daughter's Journey, May 8, 2008

By 

Yours Truly (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village (Hardcover)

In Good Neighbors, Bad Times, Mimi Schwartz writes a highly nuanced account of the Holocaust and how it affected the small German town where her father was born and which he remembered fondly until his death in the 1970s. While other reviewers have suggested this memoir for a Holocaust shelf or course, I recommend it to Christians seeking to understand how religious prejudice can blind us to the humanity of those who worship differently.

Schwartz writes engagingly of growing up in a neighborhood of mostly Jews and longing to break out. She did this by first attending the University of Michigan and later (after marrying her Jewish boyfriend) assimilating into the predominantly Christian town of Princeton, NJ. Schwartz seems to have identified more with her mother, a city girl, than her father, who was born into a cattle trading family and left the village referred to here as Benheim to fight in World War I. As a soldier, he saw how Jews were treated in Russia and when, in 1933, he attended a rally at which thousands of enthusiastic Germans saluted Adolph Hitler, he knew to leave.

While Arthur Loewengart and his brothers came to the United States, other villagers emigrated to Palestine, which was still under British rule. In the end, all but 89 of the village's Jews escaped. They were deported to camps where only two survived. Throughout her childhood, Arthur told Mimi that people in Benheim were different, kinder and more principled than the typical Nazi. After he died, she wondered if what he said was true. She began to connect the dots between survivors in New York and Israel and the German village where no Jews live today.

Her journey both physical and metaphysical is told here. It is a story of small kindnesses (and cruelties) in the midst of unimaginable larger horrors, and how truth is deeply textured but well worth knowing.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insights into the contemporary German mind, June 25, 2008

By 

A. Dragoo (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village (Hardcover)

Since I was born in 1945, World War II and the Holocaust had always been history to me. So when I spent five years working in Germany, I constantly wondered about the older people I met--"How did you respond to Hitler's regime? What do you feel now?" Even with Germans of my own generation, the topic was one I felt uncomfortable raising.
I have found Mimi Schwartz's book fascinating because she acknowledges very human conflicted feelings, the need for Gentile Germans to feel they did the best they could to help their neighbors, the deep-seated fear of a Jewish survivor who wants to believe people are basically good, the almost militant fervor of a young German Gentile seeking to discover the darkness of his parents' past. And Schwartz raises timely questions about conflicts between Christians, Jews, and Muslims that trouble this century.
Beyond the topic, I am intrigued with issues of writing memoir which Schwartz's book raises. How much should an author reveal about personal feelings? How does the writer reconcile conflicting memories? Can a writer allow herself to become vulnerable? To be too naive?
I have hardly been able to put this book down since finding it at the library, and now I want a copy for myself to highlight and reread.