The Book Sense 76
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10 Questions for Daniel Asa Rose

Rose is author of Hiding Places: A Father and his Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust -- a Book Sense 76 pick.

1. Critics have said that Hiding Places is a suspenseful and enjoyable read -- it's not really "a Holocaust book." What do you think differentiates Hiding Places from other books about the Holocaust?

There's no reason why Holocaust books can't be "enjoyable and suspenseful" despite their tragic subject matter. But if this one breaks the mold, perhaps it's because this is a book of triumph: Our relatives, the diamond smugglers, escaped. And my sons and I triumph, too, by coming to grips with this material and making peace with our identity after our own family has been shattered by divorce. It's really a story about family bonding half a century after the Holocaust.

Also, no one has thought to take children to see where it happened. A few have gone back with survivor parents in a fairly static way, to see one village or one well-known concentration camp, but it's altogether different when you go with 1990s kids to retrace a whole escape journey, trying to teach a new generation why this ancient event has relevance to their lives in a new century.

2. Why did it take you 10 years to write Hiding Places?

Finding the right tone was the hardest part. I set myself an almost impossible challenge -- to walk the razor's edge between irreverence (in the form of two rambunctious pre-teenage American kids) and dolefulness (the traditional approach to the Holocaust). There were delightfully comic things to report, such as the clash between these irrepressible kids and their dignified Old World diamond-dealer relatives, who amaze us by getting right on the kids' wave length. If I had been merely buoyant about such matters, I would have dishonored the memory of the Holocaust. But if I had maintained the lugubrious tone of other Holocaust books, I would have put my kids to sleep. I had to leaven it for a new generation, while at the same time pay homage. It's a little like what Primo Levi said about "wresting radiance from the Holocaust without in the least lightening it." In the same vein, I'm trying to open a pinprick in the blackness, without filling it full of fluorescent light.

3. Hiding Places was a new direction for you, different from your other books and articles.

After my first two books, I acknowledged I knew how to write stories and novels. I didn't want to do what a lot of writers do, which is to write for the sake of hearing one's own voice. I didn't want to put out a book a year like some of our best known authors, and end up with nothing to tackle but the great subject of golf. I wanted a big canvas. Well, I got one, with a vengeance. The Holocaust. Identity. Having Children. Having Parents. I think if people are going to demand the public ear, they ought to have something to say.

4. What do critics mean when they say Hiding Places represents a new direction for the memoir form?

I've grown impatient with memoirs that just deal with the past, and leave it at that. So many of them seem self-indulgent and self-limiting. What relevance do they have for the rest of us? What I tried to do was put a memoir in service of something larger than itself, to illuminate present-day circumstances and aspects of our culture.

5. Do the two stories work well together?

I'm excited with the way it worked out. The modern-day quest (the Europe part) is so driven it has the intensity of a thriller, but the memoir (the Connecticut part) deliberately slows it down so you have a chance to reflect. They add resonance and perspective to each other. The two stories are meant to infuse each other -- the Connecticut one gains in importance for being contrasted with the Europe story, and the Europe story is humanized by the Connecticut boyhood. Meanwhile, the story of my divorce serves as fulcrum for the two of them.

6. You've had your fiction published in The New Yorker and Partisan Review, and nonfiction in Esquire and the New York Times Magazine. What's it like to write both fiction and nonfiction?

Like being a baseball player who also plays football, or a painter who alternates between abstract and figurative. It's invigorating to go back and forth, the same way it must be for someone who sometimes votes Democratic and sometimes Republican -- though I wouldn't want to say which party corresponds to which form!

7. Whom did you read as a youngster?

Faulkner and Hemingway, the north and south poles of American literature. (Though I'm embarrassed by Hemingway today -- his machismo seems ludicrous and small.) Bertolt Brecht: the darkness was just what I needed as a teen. Nabokov for lapidary effects. D. H. Lawrence for vision. John Lennon for energetic absurdity. Some short stories by Conrad Aiken, some by my mother, Anne Rose -- and for largeness of heart, a certain Long Island boy named Walt Whitman.

8. What would you say are the most "newsworthy" events in Hiding Places?

There are five elements in the book's plot that might warrant small headlines: (a) A temple we discovered in Paris that managed to stay open throughout the Nazi occupation. Who knows about that? (b) A virtually unknown concentration camp that still stands in its original condition, the way it was when it was abandoned 60 years ago, on French soil near the Pyrenees. Who would think the French wouldn't have razed it by now? On the other hand, why isn't it a tourist site like Auschwitz? (c) How the Basque people helped Jews. Almost nothing is known about how this ancient, secretive people considered themselves the Jews of the Pyrenees, and helped hide Jews in their grottoes.(d) How we come across a village in Southern France filled with ordinary peasant farmers who heroically defended Jews. They're not in any history books, but in my mind their courage is on a par with DeGaulle's or Churchill's. (e) Finally, how Belgian Jews themselves offered the most resistance of any Jews in the war -- burning records, even managing to blow up a convoy train -- with the result that half the Jews in Belgium managed to survive (as opposed to 10 percent and 20 percent in Holland and France, right next door).

9. Did you have a "higher purpose" in writing this book?

If I did, it was to commemorate children. You know, some people call Hiding Places a love poem to my oldest sons. And I certainly did want to celebrate them at that age, at their most adorable and obnoxious. But I also wanted to universalize that love, make it symptomatic of the love all parents feel for all children. If I succeed, I make the reader fall in love not only with Alex and Marshall, but with all children. As I say toward the end, my love is nothing remarkable, it's what all parents feel, and my children are just as ordinary and precious as all others in the world -- including the ones who were lost in the Holocaust. Of course, this was another balancing act, because it's so easy to get mushy when talking about parental love. I had to keep the love muscular, as it were. This, too, was a matter of tone that took years to achieve.

10. I know you're Arts and Culture Editor of the Forward, the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world. Is Hiding Places meant to be a Jewish book?

Not at all. It's meant to speak to anyone who's ever grappled with questions of identity. As I say in the book, you don't have to be Jewish to feel a sense of alienation. Lots of us are minorities in our own minds. In a way, I was lucky to be able to point to my Judaism as the reason for why I felt out of place. Others are more challenged to find explanations for the aloneness they feel as a natural consequence of being human. In the final analysis, hiding places are a metaphor for the ways all of us feel separate, as well as special.

Further reading:

Gershom Gorenberg
Christopher Phillips
Myla Goldberg

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