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

Many years ago Elie Wiesel observed: “The mystery of goodness far exceeds the mystery of evil.” Mimi Schwartz, the American-born daughter of a refugee father from the village of Benheim (not its real name), Germany, has written an evocative memoir that explores the goodness of certain of the village’s Christians during the Holocaust. She seeks answers to two related questions: what accounted for the amity of Jewish-Christian relations in this small Black Forest community of 1200 people, 30 percent of whom were Jewish, and how can she understand herself as an assimilated American Jewish woman in relationship to Holocaust history and its aftermath? Her memoir is an elegantly written and intellectually honest response to these questions as she attentively listens to the contemporary echoes of the Holocaust.