“Decency is such a solitary act; it’s evil that draws a noisy crowd.” This discovery is at the heart of Mimi Schwartz’s new memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village, about once-good neighbors “who all got along before Hitler” and how they remember and live with a past, now lost.

Schwartz’s other recent books include Thoughts from a Queen-sized Bed, voted a 2002 book club favorite by JCC book clubs, and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl), used in writing programs nationwide.  Her short work has appeared in the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Missouri Review, Jewish Week, Christian Science Monitor, and the Writer’s Chronicle, among others, and six essays have been Notables in Best American Essays.  A veteran teacher and lecturer, Schwartz is Professor Emeritus at Richard Stockton College and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.