Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-2120-9 (ISBN)
Mimi Schwartz’s father was born Jewish in a tiny German village thirty years before the advent of Hitler when, as he’d tell her, “We all got along.” In her original memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times, Schwartz explored how human decency fared among Christian and Jewish neighbors before, during, and after Nazi times. Ten years after its publication, a letter arrived from a man named Max Sayer in South Australia. Sayer, it turns out, grew up Catholic in the village during the Third Reich and in 1937 moved into an abandoned Jewish home five houses away from where the family of Schwartz’s father had lived for generations before fleeing to America a few months earlier. The two families had never met.
Sayer wrote an unpublished memoir about his childhood memories and in Schwartz’s new edition, Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited, the two memoirs talk to each other. Weaving excerpts from Sayer’s memoir and from a yearlong correspondence with him into her book, Schwartz revisits village history from a new perspective, deepening our understanding of decency and demonization. Given the rise of xenophobia, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism in the world today, this exploration seems more urgent than ever.
Mimi Schwartz is professor emerita in the writing program at Stockton University. She is the award-winning author of numerous books, including Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (Nebraska, 2003) and When History Is Personal (Nebraska, 2018), and is the coauthor of Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction. For more information about the author, visit mimischwartz.net.
List of Illustrations
Preface: Why I’m Revisiting Good Neighbors, Bad Times
Author’s Note to the First Edition
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. A House of Antiques
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
Coda: The Conversation Continues
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
| Erscheinungsdatum | 25.01.2021 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 25 photographs, 2 illustrations, discussion questions |
| Verlagsort | Lincoln |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 140 x 216 mm |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945 | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-4962-2120-6 / 1496221206 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-4962-2120-9 / 9781496221209 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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