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

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Review
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. . . . Her writing is genial and lucid and her aim is to understand how decent people remember a dishonorable past. --Publishers Weekly

Review
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. --Shofar, an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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