Good Neighbors, Bad Times
Bison Books (Verlag)
978-0-8032-2640-1 (ISBN)
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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?
Mimi Schwartz is a professor emerita of writing at Richard Stockton College. She is the author of Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, available in a Bison Books edition, and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (co-authored with Sondra Perl). Her essays have been widely anthologized and six of them have been Notables in Best American Essays.
List of Illustrations
Author's Note Part One. Close to Home
1. Treadmill to the Past
2. Anonymous Translation
3. At the Nachmittag
4. Kaffeeklatsch
5. Joie de Vivre
6. Four Stories of the Torah
7. The Revolving Room
Part Two. An Ocean Away
8. Off the Record
9. A Little Respect, Please
10. The Good Raincoat
11. Hedwig, Fritz, and "Schtumpela"
12. The Second Generation
Part Three. Back and Forth
13. Willy from Baltimore
14. Five Kilometers Away
15. Katherine of Dorn
16. Truth Transposed
17. What Willy's Neighbor Says . . .
18. The Red Album
19. Where Legend Ends
20. At My Father's Grave
Part Four. End Points
21. The Other Miriam
22. Three Little Girls
23. Yes or No?
24. The Celebration
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
| Zusatzinfo | 20 illustrations |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Nebraska |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 146 x 222 mm |
| Gewicht | 336 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945 | |
| Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-8032-2640-3 / 0803226403 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-8032-2640-1 / 9780803226401 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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