Places in the heart

Daniel Asa Rose retraces the Holocaust for a new generation

by Johnette Rodriguez

When I first met Dan Rose in 1987, he was promoting his first book, the well-received novel Flipping For It, a transparently fictionalized account of the breakup of his marriage, his intense attachment to his two young sons and his attempts to make sense of his post-divorce life. In 1988, Rose, also a well-established travel essayist, took an unusual step to cement his relationship with his boys and to connect them to his family's (and their own) past. He took them to visit his mother's Belgian relatives, elderly Holocaust survivors, and to hunt through Belgium and France for some of their hiding places during World War II.

What began as something his friends were skeptical about -- "You're taking your kids to the Holocaust?" -- grew into a way to translate the Holocaust to a new generation in Rose's just-published book, Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust (Simon & Schuster). Rose recounts the adventures he and 12-year-old Alex and seven-year-old Marshall experienced over a four-week period during that summer 12 years ago. And he alternates chapters in Europe with chapters that relate his own childhood in Rowayton, Connecticut, where for various reasons, large and small, he was always looking for hiding places.

"My earliest memories are the most powerful," Rose admits, in a conversation in the 19th-century Rehoboth, Massachusetts, farmhouse he shares with his second wife and his second pair of sons. "I just remember every single thing that happened on the playground. I remember conversations. I remember sensations. Joyce said, `My childhood bends beside me.' That's the way it is for me. It's almost as if I'm living a parallel life."

Thus, beginning with very early memories in Queens and in Texas and, from the age of five, growing up in Connecticut (as hard to pronounce as "kickstand" for the bike-riding kindergartner), Rose delves into the secret recesses of his childhood: his fears of ogres (from the tales of those grim Grimms) and Not-sees (from his mother's stories about family members' persecution by the Nazis); his communication with inanimate objects, most of which he named, such as his trusty bike, Tommy, and his wristwatch, Timmy; his feelings of being "different," as one of the few Jewish families in town; his escapades alone and with his pals, at home and around the town.

"I dream about Rowayton several times a week," Rose reflects, bearded chin in hand. "All of these characters are with me all the time. And I found that as I wrote about them, it was almost like a hypnotic state. I could picture the fabric of the coats. I got whiffs of smells -- oh, yeah, that was the floor wax and the crayons. Or, when the teacher opens those closet doors. There's her coat in there. There's the manila paper stacked up. You just are able to get back there."

Rose's parents always encouraged him to write, and his father took down the words to his first poem when he was just nine years old. They were glad to see that his wild, passionate nature had an outlet, and they would tell him to control his emotions by writing it all down: "Channel your anger."

Working on this book for more than 10 years, Rose has learned a lot about the process of writing itself: "I write the way Harold and his Purple Crayon draw. I just follow the crayon to see where it leads me. I just write about something for a few days and set it aside and maybe only years later am I able to use it.

"So much for me has been learning how to recognize the sensation of when the writing feels real," he continues. "I used to force myself to come to my office, rain or shine, day and night. So much of it was drudgery. But then I became alert to the sensations of when the fit was coming over me. Things become very real, very vivid; it's all kind of a daydreaming mode."

It's clear that this kind of writing informed the Rowayton chapters in the book and made them very real indeed. But what about the wandering with the boys? One day biking to the Atlantic Wall, another day a train to Liege, a third a car to the Pyrennes. Was there a planned itinerary?

"I knew we would start with my relatives in Brussels," Rose recalls, thinking back to the origins of the trip. "But it was really catch-as-catch-can: make these contacts and interview on the phone in my broken French while the kids were jumping off the furniture in the background. We really did it by the seat of our pants."

Once in Brussels, he and a great-aunt got a bunch of the old-timers together at a family tea, with the boys getting overdosed on chocolate and Rose getting overloaded on stories. These stories, combined with ones from New York relatives, were, quite literally, all over the map, and he puzzled over how to boil them down for a reader, how to create a narrative line that would engage and surprise.

"I had to do some condensing, because otherwise I would be burdening the reader with the same overwhelm that I got," Rose explains. "It took me 10 years to sort through it all. I'm not going to expect that of the reader. The travels themselves are exactly as I depicted them. We went to these little towns. We met the people that we met. We saw these things. It's not that large an area, and these people have been in and out of each other's lives for centuries, so the coincidences, as amazing as they seem, are true."

Rose comments that weaving the two parts of the book together came quite easily and naturally; finding the right tone for it did not. He tried a really playful voice with a kind of con-man narrator; then a novelist's voice. He had set himself a difficult task, because he wanted to pay homage to the solemnity of the Holocaust material while not repressing the irreverence and buoyancy his sons would bring to the trip. He finally broke through to an authentic voice after writing a eulogy for a seventh-grade-through-college-years buddy, Michael Carter, who died of AIDS in San Francisco.

"On the plane out there, I wrote this eulogy, and it was different than any of the other kinds of writing I'd done," Rose remembers. "I was reading this to a group of survivors in Castro Street, and the response was very immediate. I was speaking from my heart, and they were listening from their hearts. And after that, I started hearing Michael say, `Just write it like that. Just write your book like that. Write it straight from your sober heart.' "

Although Rose doesn't see his book as a memoir, per se, he knows that's where it will be shelved in most bookstores. Sidestepping any contemporary examples of memoir, he cites the memoir-like Nick Adams stories of Hemingway as some of his favorites among writers who mined their childhood for material.

"I'm impatient with memoirs that just leave you in the past and have little to do with what readers need to know in their lives today," emphasizes Rose. "I think this is a memoir where the present-day story heals and illuminates some of the material of the past. That was also my challenge in this book.

"Maybe the reason memoir has had such a comeback is because it's so accessible," he muses. "It's a person's life. It's not necessarily chocked full of literary themes. However, what I hoped to do is bring some of those literary themes back to the memoir form."

That certainly seems evident in Hiding Places: the interweaving of the two main stories; Rose's periodic ponderings about everything from parenting to religion, with thumbnail sketches of research on his topics; his use of unusual metaphors that wind their way through both sections of the book; the piercing ring of minor motifs at the most unexpected moments. More than a memoir, Hiding Places is a thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be a parent, a child and a human being at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. n

Rose will read from Hiding Places at Borders in Garden City on Thursday, April 27 at 7 p.m., at the Brown Bookstore on Friday, April 28 at 5:30 p.m., at Books On the Square in Providence on Saturday, April 29 at 1 p.m., and on Sunday, April 30 at 2 p.m. at the Little Professor Bookstore in Barrington.