Good Neighbors, Bad Times
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
9780803226401 (ISBN)
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Mimi Schwartz grew up on milkshakes and hamburgers—and her father's boyhood stories. She rarely took the stories seriously. What was a modern American teenager supposed to make of these accounts of a village in Germany where, according to her father, "before Hitler, everyone got along"? It was only many years later, when she heard a remarkable story of the Torah from that very village being rescued by Christians on Kristallnacht, that Schwartz began to sense how much these stories might mean. Thus began a twelve-year quest that covered three continents as Schwartz sought answers in the historical records and among those who remembered that time. Welcomed into the homes of both the Jews who had fled the village fifty years earlier and the Christians who had remained, Schwartz peered into family albums, ate home-baked linzertorte (almost everyone served it!), and heard countless stories about life in one small village before, during, and after Nazi times. Sometimes stories overlapped, sometimes one memory challenged another, but always they seemed to muddy the waters of easy judgment. Small stories of decency are often overlooked in the wake of a larger historic narrative. Yet we need these stories to provide a moral compass, especially in times of political extremism, when fear and hatred strain the bonds of loyalty and neighborly compassion. How, this book asks, do neighbors maintain a modicum of decency in such times? How do we negotiate evil and remain humane when, as in the Nazi years, hate rules?
Mimi Schwartz is a professor emerita of writing at Richard Stockton College. She is the author of Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, available in a Bison Books edition, and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (co-authored with Sondra Perl). Her essays have been widely anthologized and six of them have been Notables in Best American Essays.
Contents
List of Illustrations 000Author's Note 000
Part One. Close to Home 1. Treadmill to the Past 000
2. Anonymous Translation 000
3. At the Nachmittag 000
4. Kaffeeklatsch 000
5. Joie de Vivre 000
6. Four Stories of the Torah 000
7. The Revolving Room 000
Part Two. An Ocean Away 8. Off the Record 000
9. A Little Respect, Please 000
10. The Good Raincoat 000
11. Hedwig, Fritz, and "Schtumpela" 000
12. The Second Generation 000
Part Three. Back and Forth 13. Willy from Baltimore 000
14. Five Kilometers Away 000
15. Katherine of Dorn 000
16. Truth Transposed 000
17. What Willy's Neighbor Says . . . 000
18. The Red Album 000
19. Where Legend Ends 000
20. At My Father's Grave 000
Part Four. End Points 21. The Other Miriam 000
22. Three Little Girls 000
23. Yes or No? 000
24. The Celebration 000
Acknowledgments 000
| Zusatzinfo | 20 illustrations |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Lincoln |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 146 x 222 mm |
| Gewicht | 336 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945 | |
| Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien | |
| ISBN-13 | 9780803226401 / 9780803226401 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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