In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village
  • David Patterson
Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, by Mimi Schwartz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 250 pp. $24.95.

In Good Neighbors, Bad Times Mimi Schwartz sounds the depths of human relations to open up a depth dimension of human history. She relates “small stories” to paint a big picture of an overwhelming time. Exploring personal lives and family ties, she returned to her father’s village of Benheim, southwest of Stuttgart, to retrieve the traces of the past, much as the Christians of the village rescued the Torah scrolls from the village synagogue on Kristallnacht. There she spoke with families and the descendants of families who had witnessed some of the defining moments of the Nazi horror. The result is a beautifully written volume that poses demanding questions about who we are and what our lives mean as human beings: What is at stake in our response to evil? How much are we willing to risk for the sake of our fellow human beings? And how can we find the courage to care when hatred is all around us?

Containing twenty photographs from the period, Good Neighbors, Bad Times is divided into four parts. In Part One, “Close to Home,” Schwartz relates the story of her father Arthur Loewengart. Born in 1898, he left Benheim and moved to Frankfurt, where in 1933 he attended a Hitler rally. After witnessing the frenzy of the crowd—he even got caught up in it himself—he and his wife left for Switzerland. After living for many years in Queens, he was buried in Israel upon his death in 1973. In a superbly literary style she describes her meetings with Jews of Benheim who had settled in the U.S.; from her talks with them she paints a portrait of life in pre-war Benheim and the rise of the Nazis. What is so brilliant in Schwartz’s account is her insight not only into the past but also into how memory reshapes the past, according to a person’s perspective and longing. The climax of these accounts comes with four stories of how the Christians of Benheim saved the Torah scrolls from the synagogue on the night of 9 November 1938, the Night of Broken Glass.

Part Two, “An Ocean Away,” is the tale of Schwartz’s journey to the places where the events related in Part One took place. Here too the author not only delves into memories of the past but also explores the workings of memory [End Page 167] itself. What comes to mind as one reads these pages is a saying from the Baal Shem Tov: as oblivion is tied to exile, so is memory tied to redemption. There is a kind of search for redemption here, a search for and a testimony to goodness in a time when evil prevailed. As she speaks with one Benheim resident after another, Schwartz conveys a sense both of the oblivion that threatens us and of memory that redeems us. “How quickly the mood can shift from light to dark!” she writes. “It takes only one image of a Nazi sign in the barbershop to make the memories of Benheim as Paradise fade” (p. 108). And she extends that tension to her conversations with second-generation residents of Benheim, in the context of her own status as a second-generation Jew.

Part Three is titled “Back and Forth.” Here the author transmits the tension established between Part One and Part Two in her accounts of people like Willy Weinberger, a Benheim Jew who managed to escape and whose stories of Benheim are full of “life and death, sad and funny, all mixed up” (p. 147). Written in her usual deceptively simple and accessible style, in Part Three Schwartz opens up profound questions of Jewish identity and Jewish fidelity to Judaism in the aftermath of the Nazi evil. She traces the history of antisemitism that led to the Holocaust and in the light of which Jewish allegiance to the Torah—to the Torah rescued from the Benheim synagogue—takes on all the...

pdf