Congruence and Incongruence: Four American Lives

Abstract

Congruence and Incongruence:Four American Lives Jocelyn Bartkevicius (bio) Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village. Mimi Schwartz. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. CLOTH, $24.95. Opa Nobody. Sonya Huber. American Lives Series. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. CLOTH, $24.95. The Enders Hotel: A Memoir. Brandon R. Schrand. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. PAPER, $17.95. Between Panic and Desire. Dinty W. Moore. American Lives Series. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. CLOTH, $24.95. Let me start with a confession: My habit as a reader and reviewer is to lose myself in the universe of a single book. And yet, when four intriguing new books arrived from one press this year, just in time for my last issue as book review editor for Fourth Genre, there was nothing to do but cover them all. Frankly, the thought of this enterprise was captured perfectly by the title of Dinty W. Moore's new book: it left me somewhere [End Page 141] between panic and desire. Panic at finding anything in common among four such different voices and subjects. Panic at doing justice to four writers in one review. Desire to discover what four lives might reveal about the state of contemporary literary nonfiction. What I found was a good deal of longing for lost or inaccessible fathers and father figures. In its own way, each book is a search for meaning in a murky, troubled, and troubling past—a kind of reconceptualization of the self through a reckoning of memory. Sometimes chiefly the individual past, as in The Enders Hotel. Sometimes the cultural and political past as well, as in Between Panic and Desire, Opa Nobody, and Good Neighbors, Bad Times. As Patricia Hampl writes, "Stalking the relationship, seeking congruence between stored image and hidden emotion—that's the real job of memoir." By this definition, these four books all strive to do the real job. Each examines and reexamines memory, and at least in the best passages, interrogates what is to be learned by what is remembered—and forgotten. Mimi Schwartz's Good Neighbors, Bad Times wrestles most directly with the nature of memory, its maddening yet revealing slipperiness. All through her American childhood and adolescence, Schwartz's immigrant father contrasted her behavior with the sterling characters of his family and neighbors in the German village he fled just before the rise of Nazism. "In Benheim, everyone behaved!" he'd say. And, "In Benheim, we all got along!" Or, "In Benheim, people always brought food to those in need." These virtuous behaviors, according to her father, were "self-understood." Naturally, she wasn't the least bit interested. Her desire to understand her father's past is set in motion after his death, when she encounters, in Israel, a Torah that was rescued from her father's village synagogue by Christians during Kristallnacht. Schwartz writes: "I never thought of ordinary Germans rescuing a Torah or anything else Jewish back then. My images were of black boots marching across the Hollywood movies I grew up watching at the Queens Midway Theater, ones full of Nazis I hated and feared." So maybe her father had been right all along. Maybe his memories of Benheim were not idealized, or sanitized to keep unruly children on their toes. Perhaps his village had had some special sense of community and connection that could have transcended even Nazism. Benheim—like the names of the people whose stories she explores—is a [End Page 142] made-up name, a way of protecting the privacy of those Schwartz ultimately had to turn to in searching for memories like her father's. She suddenly craved his stories, but he was dead. She had to turn to others, Jews who fled Benheim and Gentiles who stayed behind. Immediately, Schwartz encounters contradictory memories, often from a single source. Take a woman she calls "Lotte." During their first meeting, she is the epitome of "joie de vivre," full of stories about feeling free and safe in Benheim, welcomed by Jews and Gentiles alike, open to each other's traditions. But the next time they meet, Lotte is dark and brooding...