Mimi Schwartz's essays are so down-to-earth, so lacking in fuss and floweriness, that you tend to pay attention to their remarkable, inherent elegance only when you've put down the book. Its prose seems, simply, inevitable. And whether she's discussing the ironies of Jewish and Muslim lives and attitudes during a trip to Israel, or the idiosyncracies of her own family, Mimi Schwartz delivers wisdom lightly and is not above equating the option for surgery to restore the ravages of time and disease with the option to use the comma: "when in doubt leave it out."
The pieces, which follow her life from childhood through a long marriage, sickness, and the death of her husband, use the particulars of her own experience to reflect the larger events of which they're a part. Her father's nostalgia evokes the Germany from which he fled, her house in Princeton invites American history, and a visit to Israel reveals a country too rich in contradiction to define. The most moving essays, not surprisingly, are those about the death of Mimi Schwartz's husband, Stu, and the extraordinary energy and courage with which she meets it. She's a superb writer; and with "When History Is Personal" she's at the top of her form.
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