University of Nebraska Press author Mimi Schwartz will be appearing in Lincoln, Nebraska on Tuesday, November 18 for a book signing, reading, and discussion of her recent memoir Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village. The event will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Dudley Bailey Library, 228 Andrews Hall, on the University of Nebraska−Lincoln campus.

Mimi Schwartz recovers the history of a German Village and the journey into her family's past in her latest memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times. Schwartz grew up on her father's boyhood stories and rarely took them 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 50 years earlier and the Christians who had remained, Schwartz peered into family albums, ate home-baked linzertorte, 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.

"Mimi Schwartz has found a fresh way to write about the unspeakable loss of the Holocaust: her humor, warm humanity and honesty, her appetite for contradiction and irony, sparkle on every page. The result is both deeply affecting and full of surprises."—Phillip Lopate, author of Getting Personal and The Art of the Personal Essay

The upcoming event is sponsored by the Norman and Bernice Harris Center for Judaic Studies, Prairie Schooner, and the University of Nebraska Press. The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase.