Good Neighbors, Bad Time: Echoes of My Father's German Village (review)

Mimi Schwartz has long been considered an important writer and teacher of creative nonfiction, a genre that combines the research and fact-finding strategies of journalism with the narrative techniques of literary fiction. Her last book, Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, confirmed Schwartz's talent for giving engaging, witty accounts of "real life"; this collection of linked essays presented a picture of a forty-year marriage that was not only funny but also deeply moving. In Schwartz's current book, Good Neighbors, Bad Time: Echoes of My Father's German Village, one finds again the same wry narrator with a gift for spotting poignant, telling moments.

This time, Schwartz's subject is the Shoah. Raised on her father's memories of an idyllic childhood in southwest Germany, Schwartz grew up skeptical of claims about prewar Christian-Jewish harmony, discounting her father's dictum that "In Benheim, we all got along" (5). Only as an adult, while on a sight-seeing trip to Israel, does Schwartz begin to consider the possibility that her father's recollections may be closer to reality than to mythology; after seeing an old Torah—which may (or may not) have been saved by Christian citizens of Benheim—Schwartz turns detective, attempting to discover the truth about her father's village.

Over the course of twelve years, the author rummages through archives, interviews Christians and Jews, scrutinizes witness testimony, and attends many commemorative events, all in an effort to gain a clearer picture of Benheim's residents at the start of the Second World War. As Schwartz explains, "small stories" may lead to "the big stories about Good, Evil, Truth, Bravery, and Denial" (xv). It is these "small stories" that make Good Neighbors, Bad Times such a gripping read. The book is most affective when Schwartz focuses on particular conversations, the gestures and verbal ticks of her interlocutors, the German houses and apartments where her interviews take place. Like a painter, she renders precisely observed miniatures of people affected by the Shoah, many of whom are unable to recover from their trauma or who cannot come to terms with the guilt, shame and regret that are the legacy of the Holocaust.

Occasionally the text falters, however, when Schwartz incorporates historiography into what is—for all intents and purposes—a layman's tale. For instance, near the beginning of the book, Schwartz considers the empirical evidence she has gathered from interviews with current and former citizens of Benheim. These conversations lead back inevitably to the question of whether German civilians helped their Jewish neighbors as much as they could have: "So here it is again: the refrain of Christian neighbors doing what they could. More support for why Benheim Jews say 'Decent people, decent people,' even as authoritative books such as Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners condemn all Germans, saying they all knew what was going on and should have done more" (41). This characterization of Goldhagen's scholarship as "authoritative" was already problematic in the early 1990s, when Schwartz first began work on her project; in 2008, Schwartz's description of Hitler's Willing Executioners sounds glaringly outdated and mars her own authority.

Even the title Good Neighbors, Bad Times alludes to a well-known history. Jan Gross's provocative Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, a book about the complex, strained and ultimately deadly relationship between Christians and Jews in 1941 in a small Polish town. Schwartz's title does itself a disservice because it oversimplifies what she herself acknowledges is a thorny and emotionally-charged relationship. A reader may wish that Schwartz had concentrated on her narrative strengths—lucid prose, nuanced portraiture, and journalistic precision—rather than venturing beyond her area of expertise.

It also seems likely that Good Neighbors, Bad Times could be overshadowed by a work published less than two years ago, Daniel Mendelsohn's acclaimed memoir The Lost: A Search...