“Memoir that bears witness to history, I’ve come to realize, is never a simple matter of finishing,” author Mimi Schwartz writes at the end of the preface to her new memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited, about her Jewish father’s pre-WWII German village. “‘That’s how it was’ changes with each new angle of vision—be it from an unpublished memoir or because the world has changed with a seismic shift.”

In her author note at the opening of the first edition, which she includes in this second edition, she describes her book as “one of small stories, the ones that history has no time for as it paints the broad strokes. These stories, I’ve found, lead to the big ones about Good, Evil, Truth, Bravery, Loyalty, Decency, and Denial—and, in my case helped me to sort what I inherited, but never knew firsthand.”

I am so pleased that author Mimi Schwartz agreed to an email interview about her writing process for the second edition of her book.

Sheila
In 2008, you published the first edition of your memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times, about trying to understand how decency fared among Jewish and Christian neighbors in your father’s German village before, during, and after Hitler. Why revisit this village story now?

Mimi
Because the story has become more complicated. The rise of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the United States and the world made what happened in this village in the 1930s seem less distant, more present tense. History moved in closer. And then this letter arrived, out of the blue, from an 88-year-old man in South Australia named Max Sayer. This “Australian,” it turns out, grew up Catholic in this same village, called Rexingen, five houses from where my Jewish family had lived for generations. He wrote to thank me and to say, “Your father was right. [Before Hitler] We all got along.” After a back and forth of emails, Max sent me his private memoir about his childhood during the Third Reich, and when I read it, I heard two memoirs talking to each other, as if out of different windows of history. I wanted to capture that “conversation” in Good Neighbors, Bad Times Revisited.

Sheila
The idea of “memoirs talking to each other” is intriguing. How does your approach differ from the way you incorporated voices from your interviews in the initial story? And were you not afraid of undermining your original story by giving someone else some of your authorial power?

Mimi
I did worry, at first, that Max’s words might overshadow mine—and I liked what I had written. But once I found a structure for letting Max have his say, I realized how much complexity and nuance he contributed to my story. Rather than undermine, he enriched—as in this account of Kristallnacht, the night that the Nazis burned down the synagogues of Germany.  I’d interviewed forty people and many spoke about this terrible night, but none let me into Max’s eight-year-old world:

. . . when we kids came home from school, we sneaked inside to have a look — the first time ever I set foot into a synagogue. There were books laying around everywhere and I picked up part of a Torah scroll to take home, but when I came home Mum sent me straight back to return it. The air was still full of smoke and wet paper and material — it didn’t smell like a Christian church at all, the whole thing looked very sad.

Max’s son, Mäxle (who had sent me his father’s memoir) felt the need to apologize for his father’s behavior eighty years earlier, and I was touched.

I hope you will forgive my father about the Torah scroll, but he was just an inquisitive eight-year-old boy, and his mother insisted that he take it straight back where he found it.

I realized that he, too, was part of this conversation, and both the father’s memory and the son’s apology appear in one of the 20 mini-chapters that I placed between my original chapters, each deepening the story. I chose what moved me, enlightened me, and challenged me—whether it was Max’s worry about two little Jewish neighbors leaving for England with no English—“Who will talk to them?”—or remembering his first Nazi parade at age five, or his mother crying on the morning when all the Jews disappeared.

Sheila
Did you and Max collaborate on which excerpts to use? How much negotiation was involved?

Mimi
Our collaboration was not a traditional one like the way Sondra Perl and I co-wrote Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction.  She or I would write a first draft, the other would elaborate, cut, rephrase, and edit, and we’d go back and forth until both of us were satisfied. In this book, those decisions were all mine. Our agreement was that Max could publish his memoir independently (I put him in touch with a small publisher) and he gave me permission to choose excerpts for my book, involving maybe 20 out of 138 pages. The agreement would not have happened, however, without the trust we’d developed over months of collaborating by email (with the help of son Mäxle), asking each other questions we never dreamed we’d ask, sharing photos, and investigating troublesome facts as a kind of team. Eighty years after our families didn’t meet—the last of my Jewish family fled the village a few months before Max’s family moved onto the street—we became “virtual good neighbors.”

My last chapter, “The Conversation Continues,” shows how that happened. I used our email exchanges to reveal our developing relationship, not just between Max and me, but one that included his son Mäxle, and the rest of his family: Berhhard, Trudi-Ann and his wife Bernice. Even the grandkids got in the act a year later when we finally met on Zoom. You can see parts of that in a video on my website.

Sheila
I imagine that for you to discuss Nazi Germany from such different vantage points was full of landmines of guilt and blame. How did you deal with that?

Mimi
We listened to each other with honesty, respect, and no attempt to rewrite village history. It helped me as a Jew that Max had been a small boy, not a teenager, when he described his excitement at a Nazi parade and that he became a leader of Hitler Youth at age eleven, not adult enough for moral choices.  From this memoir, I felt Max’s parents supported Hitler but were not anti-Semites, but I couldn’t be sure. Certainty, much to my surprise, didn’t seem to matter. This collaboration was not about forgetting or forgiving; it was about being engrossed in a joint project and finding out we could work on it together with civility that evolved into goodwill.

Our biggest landmine came late. Mäxle asked me to consider rephrasing a line which he felt made his family seem like avid supporters of Hitler. I’d written:

…we were “Other” to each other. I was the daughter of Jews that had to flee the village, a story not often talked about, The Sayers were the “Germans” who supported Hitler.…

I wrote back that I was not writing fact, but what was in my head, which he accepted, writing back:

I am softening on my need for this to be changed. Personally, I still prefer something like “The Sayers represented the “Germans,” the people that supporter Hitler….

I had no legal obligation to make a change, but I wanted to make the family happy if possible. So I made a change, not the one he suggested, but one that seemed to settle the issue. I changed “were” to “represented” as in: “The Sayers represented the “Germans” who supported Hitler.”

It took a lot for him to ask, for me to listen, and to make a change we both could live with: a collaboration that depended on months of trust that the family and I had built together.

Sheila
One final question about structure. Do you think other memoirs could benefit from adding other perspectives, often contradictory, to enrich their stories? Would you use it again?

Mimi
Absolutely. The power of memoir is to present the world as one person experiences it. But that can also be its weakness. The lens into the past that each of us looks through can be too narrow. To widen it, we need a Max or two with memories that inform and challenge our own. Dialogue helps. Paraphrasing and direct quotations from others help. Excerpts of letters help, as do monologues from memoirs, which I use here. All offer what I call OPV (Opposing Points of View), and they make our stories better. So whether your OPVs come from one voice—father, mother, sibling, lover, ex-spouse, whoever—or from many, let other voices have a say in your story. Your readers will believe you more, not less.

Sheila
Do you have advice for those incorporating the writing or oral histories of others into a memoir?

Mimi
I would say be fair, accurate, and keep the words of others in the context they intended. But hold onto your creative control. Letting others have their say does not mean giving up your point of view. Phrases such as “He remembers X, but I remember Y” add to the story. That is how life is. If you are collaborating on the writing the way I did with Sondra Perl, I recommend a written agreement defining who does what. Many collaborators end up very unhappy with each other, but Sondra and I remain very great friends, and I credit that, in part, to our written agreement. As far as “collaborating” with Max is concerned, I did not show him or the family what I had done until it was 99% complete. I held back, similarly, in my 2008 book, showing it to only two villagers before it was published. The only time I shared work-in-progress was in my marriage memoir, Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed. I showed my husband first drafts because I was the scribe for both of us, especially about the double health crisis we survived together. I didn’t change my version of memory if we disagreed; I added his. Not only did the story improve, but we stayed married!

Max was happy with the book, as was the whole family. A great relief to me. They sent me his photo, beaming with book in hand. He’d received it a few weeks before he died, so book and photo: they were gifts to both of us.

Sheila
Thank you for allowing us to look inside the process you used in revisiting the memoir. I want to let readers know they can learn more about how you worked in this Boston Globe essay entitled, “When the Nazis came, not everyone divided neatly into ‘good’ neighbors and ‘bad,’” and of course, first-hand by reading your book, Good Neighbors Bad Times Revisited.

As you report from your experience traveling to your father’s village and corresponding with Max: Instead of heroic acts, I learned about small gestures of decency, like delivering soup over a fence at night; sharing a ration card; cutting Jewish hair despite the sign “No Jews or dogs allowed.” Things I hope I would risk for a neighbor under threat — although you never know, do you?

That question is a haunting one, especially now as we watch growing divisiveness, threats and epithets reach into the lives of restaurant and retail workers, teachers, and even doctors and nurses, and we watch women’s rights curtailed in Texas and soon many other states.

How many of us will make the small gestures that save decency, that save our connections to one another? As Hillel said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being only for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”