The Girl From Human Street, Roger Cohen
The Girl From Human Street, Roger Cohen
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

The Girl From Human Street
Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

Author: Roger Cohen

Narrator: Simon Vance

Unabridged: 10 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/13/2015


Synopsis

The award-winning New York Times columnist and former foreign correspondent turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own family—most notably his mother’s—in order to understand more profoundly the nature of modern Jewish experience. Through his emotionally lucid prose, we relive the anomie of European Jews after the Holocaust, following them from Lithuania to South Africa, England, the United States, and Israel.

Cohen illuminates the uneasy resonance of the racism his family witnessed living in apartheid-era South Africa and the ambivalence felt by his Israeli cousin when tasked with policing the occupied West Bank. He explores the pervasive Jewish sense of “otherness” and finds it has been a significant factor in his family’s history of manic depression. This tale of remembrance and repression, suicide and resilience, moral ambivalence and uneasily evolving loyalties (religious, ethnic, national) both tells an unflinching personal story and contributes an important chapter to the ongoing narrative of Jewish life.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Eric on February 09, 2015

Through the vehicle of his family stories across generations and countries, Roger Cohen has captured the South African Jewish experience, from its origins in Eastern Europe - its depth, its richness, its difficulties and struggles. But the book covers much more than this… Cohen’s parents emigrate fr......more

Goodreads review by Adam on June 19, 2016

This is a superb example of family history writing. It rivals my other favourite in this genre, Vikram Seth's Two Lives. Roger Cohen's book is a tour-de-force because it combines the story of his family, its flight from Lithuania to South Africa and elsewhere, with an account of the plight of the Je......more

Goodreads review by Renita on August 15, 2021

Beautiful and poignant......more

Goodreads review by Helen on April 12, 2015

I came to read this book because of this review on the NAMI blog: [URL not allowed]-Blog/... The author is a talented writer. It is very poignant, often heartbreakingly so. I wonder at the author's seeming detachment. He only refers to his mother by her first name, June. It seems to be t......more

Goodreads review by Louise on July 24, 2016

This book was not what I expected. I thought I was going to read the story of a Jewish South African (the author's mother, June) woman suffering from Bi polar. June's story is a constant thread throughout the book, along with digressing, albeit briefly with stories of other people's struggles with t......more