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

There is something inviting about Mimi Schwartz's Good Neighbors, Bad Times. Perhaps it is the coziness of the subtitle: Echoes of My Father's German Village. Or maybe it has to do with the nostalgic, sepia-toned photograph of two children on the cover. You pick it up with a sense that this will not be a sickening dive into the mind of an ss officer (Jonathan Littell's Bienveillantes) or hours relived inside a concentration camp (Elie Wiesel's Night). Maybe it will even have a happy ending, you think, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank or Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. Maybe this one will, somehow, be comforting.

But despite all the warm conversations over slices of Linzertorte, this is not a comforting book. Mimi Schwartz, the all-American daughter of a German family that got out just in time, is a pragmatic woman who sets out to test some assumptions. She finds more ambiguity than she bargained for, in ways that recall Hannah Arendt's commentary on the "banality of evil." The village, renamed here to "protect the privacy of the nonfamous," is a place where good neighbors of different faiths tried to help each other. But kindness, we learn, was like a thin sheet of glass, easily shattered on Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass," on November 9, 1938.

How could a village of 1,200 people that was 30 percent Jewish—and where a mere 16 percent voted for Adolf Hitler in the defining moment of 1933—allow its neighbors to "disappear"? And how have survivors on all sides of this complex equation come to terms with themselves, not to mention with those left behind?

These are the questions that Schwartz serves up with those generous slices of cake and recipes for potato bread. We meet plenty of "split personalities" who straddled the fence with a foot on each side: a courageous Christian policeman who removed the Torah from the synagogue before it was destroyed, a gravedigger who helped to bury it in the Jewish cemetery on the hill, a pharmacist who gave shelter to a young couple until he had to say, "You must go now." Survival was often linked to the sacrifice of someone else. Indeed, the underlying interrogation of this work is embedded in the questions that can only be pondered, never answered: What would you have done?

In the author's family, brave brothers prepared their escape in 1936 by hiding money on trains headed for Switzerland in a relay race against time. Settling in Queens, New York, Arthur Lowengart always kept in touch with fellow villagers in America, Europe, and Israel, where several families founded a new community. Over time, the old days in the village became a touchstone of common sense and common decency. Skeptical but open to persuasion, Mimi Schwartz digs deep in search of the roots, as well as the rotten seeds, of her father's hard-earned idealism.

Indeed, part of the pleasure of reading her carefully crafted work has to do with the unlikely mix of people we encounter: a young German researcher disgusted with his nation's history; an affluent Catholic who makes amends by documenting the story of his village; elderly sisters in New York who correct each other's memories over coffee; a Holocaust survivor who made it in America as a butcher and never lost his faith or ability to laugh. This is the man who pinpoints where hatred begins when he remembers that older people in the village were slow to change their behavior toward Jews. "But the children were a different story," he says. They learned to hate their Jewish classmates from politically correct teachers and, as Schwartz points out, "they had no sense of village history to counter it." There was, it seems, a continuum between playground bullies and extermination camps. Who could have known?

If there is a weakness in the book it might be Schwartz...