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

Mimi Schwartz grew up on hamburgers and French fries—and her father’s boyhood stories. She rarely took them seriously. What was a modern American teenager supposed to make of a German village where, according to her father,  “everyone got along” before Hitler? It was only years later, when she heard the story of the Torah’s rescue in 1938 by Christians in the village, that Schwartz became interested in her father’s old world. And so began a twelve-year quest that covered three continents as she sought answers to how good neighbors, on the sidelines of history, managed during Nazi times. How, this book asks, do people maintain a modicum of decency when fear and hatred strain the bonds of loyalty and neighborly compassion?    

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Critical praise for Good Neighbors, Bad Times

Trenton Times interview

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“[A]n eloquent and affectionate account… Schwartz’s tone is gentle, her prose brilliantly clear and her insights keen.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“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…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

“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