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Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family
by Roger Cohen
In this luminous memoir, award-winning New York Times columnist Roger Cohen turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own forebears. As he follows them across continents and decades, mapping individual lives that diverge and intertwine, vital patterns of struggle and resilience, valued heritage and evolving loyalties (religious, ethnic, national), converge into a resonant portrait of cultural identity in the modern age.
Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the present day, Cohen tracks his family's story of repeated upheaval, from Lithuania to South Africa, and then to England, the United States, and Israel. It is a tale of otherness marked by overt and latent anti-Semitism, but also otherness as a sense of inheritance. We see Cohen's family members grow roots in each adopted homeland even as they struggle to overcome the loss of what is left behind and to adapt—to the racism his parents witness in apartheid-era South Africa, to the familiar ostracism an uncle from Johannesburg faces after fighting against Hitler across Europe, to the ambivalence an Israeli cousin experiences when tasked with policing the occupied West Bank.
At the heart of The Girl from Human Street is the powerful and touching relationship between Cohen and his mother, that "girl." Tortured by the upheavals in her life yet stoic in her struggle, she embodies her son's complex inheritance.
Graceful, honest, and sweeping, Cohen's remarkable chronicle of the quest for belonging across generations contributes an important chapter to the ongoing narrative of Jewish life.
"Starred Review. Honest and lucid…With limpid prose, Cohen delivers a searching and profoundly moving memoir." - Kirkus
"Cohen explores the tentacles of repressed memory in Jewish identity...Thoughtful, wide-ranging, he muses on his own migrations spurred by 'buried truths.'" - Publishers Weekly
"Insightful, sometimes controversial commentary on crucial contemporary issues." - Booklist
"A gifted journalist...a quest for core values in a family history spanning three continents, in which one uprooting led to the next. Many readers will find a mirror in Roger Cohen's layered, ambitious, haunting book." - Joseph Lelyveld, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
"Roger Cohen has given us a profound and powerful book, gripping from start to finish. The story of his Jewish family's suffering and success, from Lithuania before the Shoah to South Africa, London and Tel Aviv today, features fierce battles against external demons (Hitler, Stalin, pervasive anti-Semitism) and the internal demons of depression and displacement. Wise and reflective, The Girl from Human Street is memoir at its finest." - Fritz Stern, author of Five Germanys I Have Known
"Roger Cohen captures a century's upheavals in his moving, thoughtful, and well-written family saga." - Henry A. Kissinger
"Beautifully written and deeply moving, The Girl from Human Street is at once a love letter to a lost mother and an unflinching account of devastation and displacement. How can a story of such sweeping scope also be so tender and so intimate? Roger Cohen turns personal and historical excavation into symphony." - Mary Szybist, winner of the National Book Award
This information about The Girl from Human Street was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times, where he has worked since 1990, primarily as Paris correspondent, bureau chief in the Balkans and Berlin, and foreign editor. Prior to that he was a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. His work has won wide recognition, including awards from the Overseas Press Club, and he has taught at Princeton and Harvard universities. Raised in South Africa and England, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, he is a naturalized American.
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