Hiding Places
Award-winning psychologist Diane Wyshogrod reconstructs her mother’s biography and comes to understand her own.
A daughter’s story, a Jewish story, an American story
In this stirring search by a daughter into her mother’s extraordinary past, Diane Wyshogrod uses a master psychologist’s passion for truth and a journalist’s eye for detail to shed light on her mother’s life: her idyllic childhood, her life under occupation in war-time Poland, particularly her experiences of hiding, afraid for her life, in a tiny cellar.
What if it was your mother crouching under that floor? Wouldn’t you wonder: how did she stand it? How did it feel? What did it do to her? Why did those people who hid her agree to do it? And finally, how did all this affect you?
HIDING PLACES: A Mother, a Daughter, an Uncovered Life will resonate with any reader wanting to connect with a parent’s difficult past. Wyshogrod draws from all facets of her identity, as a clinical psychologist, a one-time organizer of programs for children of survivors in New York, a writer, a daughter, and mother to tenderly redeem Helen Rosenberg’s life, and, in doing so, make sense of her own.
This eloquent memoir of a single family encompasses the entire arc of Helen Rosenberg’s life, from her youth and young womanhood in prewar and wartime Poland, to her liberation and post war years in New York and Jerusalem. An intimate exploration of family ties and ambivalences, this masterful work of discovery and self-discovery probes the mysteries of familial love, the power of motherhood, and the way we all might move through trauma to reach new horizons.
Click here to read the Prologue to the book.
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