Fact Checking Father

Although Mimi Schwartz is an academic (emerita), Good Neighbors, Bad Times is not an academic book per se. In fact, the book defies generic conventions: it is based in historical fact and on extensive interviews conducted by Schwartz, which are partly cited verbatim in the text, but the historical record and interview materials are embedded in a lyrical narrative that binds past and present, Europe, the US and Israel, and two or three generations. Genre determinations are further confounded by numerous photographs and, on one page, a detailed recipe for making Berches, or potato bread (no explanation for the recipe is given, other than numerous textual references to the bread being eaten). The overall style and eminent readability of the work—it is difficult to put the book down once begun—remind me of Alison Owings's Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (1995). Like Owings, Schwartz has a talent for interweaving the interview questions and responses in such a fashion that they are in no way tedious (as interview exchanges often can be). In many ways, her quest to discover the truth about her immigrant father's native village in Germany reads like a detective story. She effectively engages the reader as a co-investigator by constantly inserting metatextual doubts, questions, comments, and reservations about her interviewees' responses—all clearly marked in italics. The reader is automatically drawn into the author's asides and cannot help but be caught up in trying to ferret out the truth when multiple, and sometimes contradictory, versions of events are recounted.

Already the title of Schwartz's book suggests the oxymoronic nature of the task the author has set herself: her father repeatedly claimed, as she was growing up in the US, that in his home village in Southern Germany, named Benheim in this book, Christians and Jews lived together peacefully for centuries, and furthermore—and most surprisingly—that the Christians helped their Jewish neighbors during the twelve years of the Third Reich. Since this was a unique story among stories emerging from the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and since the author both wanted and needed her father's stories to be true, she decided as an adult to pursue them to discover whether they had, in fact, been a true reflection of her father's life in the village. Her quest takes her from New York to Benheim to Israel, and back and forth again many times, before she feels ready to write the book. She begins by interviewing Jewish survivors from Benheim who emigrated as a group to New York and left Germany early enough in the 1930s not to be deported by the Nazis. These initial contacts, as well as later ones, prove to be serendipitous as the interviewees provide her with an ever-growing list of additional contacts. Schwartz ends up interviewing not only the Benheim émigrés in New York, but also Jews and Christians in Benheim itself and environs, as well as Jewish emigrants who left Benheim as a group and founded a new village in Israel. I was amazed at the breadth of experience represented in her sampling. Toward the end of the book, she also discovers a family of half Jewish children (now adults), who were also part of the larger Benheim story. Schwartz further expands her sample by talking to numerous (adult) children of those who were adults in Benheim during the Nazi era. The result is an extremely comprehensive picture of what happened to the inhabitants of a German village with a considerable Jewish population (30+ percent) during the Third Reich. To contextualize her sample, she also visits two other, somewhat larger villages in the area and compares interviewees' responses there with those of the Benheimers. I was amazed by the variation in experience, the different kinds of images and events that were retained in people's memories—sometimes in extraordinary detail, and the interviewees' readiness to plunge back into dark places of their personal...