Description: In the wake of his divorce, Daniel Asa Rose despairs over his disconnection from his sons. Working fiercely to strengthen their sense of family, he takes them on a trip in which they retrace their relatives' escape from Antwerp during World War II to instill in them the importance of a heritage that he himself is ambivalent about.

With this highly innovative book, Rose transforms the experiences of his personal life into a potent and often irreverent rumination on some of the central themes of modern Jewish life: the responsibilities of parenthood, Jewish anti-Semitism, the struggles of assimilation, and the double-edged consolations of spirituality.

Hiding Places alternates between the story of his trip with Marshall, seven, and Alex, twelve, in search of the barn lofts and wine cellars that sheltered their family, and Rose's razor-sharp reminiscences of his own "hiding places" growing up as one of the only Jews in a WASP Connecticut town. Memoir and modern-day quest come together in the shattering culmination, where father and sons are lost amid the rusted barbed wire and faded swastikas of the desolate concentration camp in southern France where their cousins suffered fifty years before.

Rose has already earned a name for expertly balancing levity and depth in his stories, which have won the O. Henry Prize and two PEN awards. With the revelatory Hiding Places, he brings the same clarity and brave candor to bear, as he introduces the Holocaust to a new generation and heals his own childhood.

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