GOOD NEIGHBORS BAD TIMES REVISITED

Given the rising hatred of "Other" in our polarized world, the need for stories of small decencies that show what we all can do, brave or not, grows daily. And that is what Mimi Schwartz explores in Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited.

It builds on her award-winning, first edition in 2008, which sought to find out from once-good neighbors in her father's boyhood village of Rexingen (both the Jews who fled and Christians who stayed) how they remembered each other in their shared village, population 1,200, of which one-third was once Jewish.

This new edition began in 2018 with a letter, out of the blue, from a man in Australia, who thanked Schwartz for her book and assured her that "Your father was right. We all got along." He, Max Sayer, a Catholic, was born in Rexingen in 1930 and, it turned out, had written a private memoir of his boyhood years 1935-1945. So began a correspondence that led to her forthcoming Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited: New Echoes of My Father's German Village. It includes interspersed excerpts of Max's memoir "in conversation with" Schwartz's original text - and a chapter about the developing trust and friendship, across oceans, between two families that, without Hitler, would have lived five houses apart.