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The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family, by Roger Cohen
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An intimate and profoundly moving Jewish family history—a story of displacement, prejudice, hope, despair, and love.
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.
- Sales Rank: #378935 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-01-13
- Released on: 2015-01-13
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“Beautifully crafted. . . . [Cohen] reveals how the threads of [his] legacy of displacement are woven together, all the while making visible tears in the fabric never to be fully mended.” —The Washington Post
“Powerful storytelling. . . . Sometimes breathtaking. . . . Written with a generosity that is truly humane.” —The New York Review of Books
“A tale of anguish and a tale of trying to understand. . . . [As with] Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness . . . we are in the hands of a master stylist. . . . As a writer [Cohen] is peerless among his journalist colleagues.” —Haaretz (Jerusalem)
“Cohen places the particular experiences of his family in a large historical frame. . . . In his instructive meditations on history and Jewish life, Cohen . . . catches virtually the entire twentieth century.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Profound. . . . [Cohen’s] memoir will linger in any reader’s memory.” —USA Today
“Brave, honorable and enlightened.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Exquisite. . . . [Cohen] writes with a poetic fragility . . . always striving for moral clarity, even when his own inner contradictions and complexities impede him.” —The Jerusalem Post
“I am moved by this book. I find fascinating the fusion of the private, even intimate family story with the history of European Jews in the twentieth century, the marriage of a subtle memoir with an essay on Jewish identity, tradition and assimilation, various diasporas and Israel, Israelis and Palestinians, humanism vs. fanaticism.” —Amos Oz
“Impressive. . . . [Cohen’s] moving, beautifully written book may be a ‘story of the 20th century’, but it also explores how Jewish identity might evolve in the 21st.”
—Ian Critchley, The Sunday Times
“A moving, complex story that traces a family’s century of migration.”
—The Financial Times
“By tracing where his mother came from . . . [Cohen] speaks universally in this disarmingly raw narrative, and his lovely but haunted mother even more so—not least in her refusal to give up trying to love.” —The Guardian
“Roger Cohen captures a century’s upheavals in his moving, thoughtful, and well-written family saga.” —Henry A. Kissinger
“Cohen knows the pleasures and also the loneliness of diaspora. In writing his stirring memoir, in constructing a past with which he can live, he wrestled with demons both historical and personal.” —The Huffington Post
“Honest and lucid. . . . a searching and profoundly moving memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Unsparing. . . . Outstanding.” —San Francisco Book Review
“Beautifully written and deeply moving . . . 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
“Roger Cohen has given us a profound and powerful book, gripping from start to finish. . . . Wise and reflective, The Girl from Human Street is memoir at its finest.” —Fritz Stern, author of Five Germanys I Have Known
About the Author
Roger Cohen is a columnist for The New York Times, where he has worked since 1990: as a correspondent in Paris and Berlin, and as bureau chief in the Balkans covering the Bosnian war (for which he received an Overseas Press Club prize). He was named a columnist in 2009. He became foreign editor on 9/11, overseeing Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage in the aftermath of the attack. His columns appear twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. His previous books include Soldiers and Slaves and Hearts Grown Brutal. He lives in New York City.
@NYTimesCohen
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On May 7, 1945, my uncle, Capt. Bert Cohen of the Dental Unit of the Sixth South African Armored Division, Nineteenth Field Ambulance, made the following entry in his war diary:
After lunch Hilton Barber lent me his jeep and I scudded away on a delightful jaunt. We traveled through twisting country byways until the town of Monza. There we followed route 36 northward to Lecco. As we bypassed the town we got our first view of the famous Alpine lakes . . . an azure strip of unbelievable blue flanked by great mountains. . . . We passed through several icy tunnels and the beauty of the scene grew more breathtaking as we neared Bellagio, a wonderful village nestling in the fork of the lake beneath the majestic mountains. . . . A drove of little boys clambered onto the jeep, an incredible number appeared from all over the place. At one stage Wilson counted 21 of them on the jeep. Bellagio was indeed delightful. It was while there that we heard that the war was over, a report that was subsequently verified as we drove on down Lake Como to Como. . . . All along the road from Bellagio throngs had lined each village street and flowers in profusion had been tossed into the jeep.
So, in Bellagio, right here, feted by children and flowers, my uncle’s war ended. “GUERRA FINITA!!!”—“WAR OVER!!!”—he exulted in his diary. He was twenty-six and far from home. As a young dentistry graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he had enlisted in Johannesburg on January 15, 1943. After training, he flew by stages to Egypt to join the Allies’ North African campaign. From there, in April 1944, he embarked for Italy, on the lowest deck, landing in Taranto, near the heel of Italy’s boot. Churchill had called Italy “the soft underbelly of the Axis,” but resistance to the Allied assault was stern. Bert’s progress northward through Naples, Rome, and Florence to Bellagio was no sunlit Italian passeggiata. The winter of 1944 was spent encamped high in the freezing Apennines facing a German line stretching across the country from Pisa to Rimini. He filled teeth in freezing, improvised dental surgeries.
Bert had to battle through the German lines. At Finale Emilia, north of Modena, on April 24, 1945, he was ordered into a bend in the Penaro River where a Nazi column was trapped. Skiet gemors—Shoot the garbage—was a rough guide to his Afrikaner commander’s battle code. An artillery battery pulverized the enclave. Wrecked vehicles smoldered. Wounded horses, nostrils flared in gasping horror, bayed—a terrible sound. In the carnage, ammunition exploded and tires burst. The stench of roasted flesh and putrefaction pervaded the air. Intestines of gutted animals ballooned from their carcasses. A squad of South African infantry marched through the ruins, bringing a bullet of mercy to animals that still agonized. One dead German in particular caught Bert’s eye: a blond, square-jawed young man with a long straight nose, hair flecked with blood and smoke, legs twisted grotesquely, abdomen ripped open, coils of gut spilling through a ragged gash into the dust, sightless blue eyes gazing at infinity. Beside the corpse lay scattered letters from the soldier’s mother in Hamburg. She wrote about Der Angriff, the Allied bombardment of the city that killed more than 42,000 people. Uncertain what to do, Bert returned the letters to the dead man’s pocket before grabbing a few ampoules of morphine found in an abandoned, ammunition-filled German ambulance.
That single German corpse among the more than 600,000 casualties of the Italian campaign haunted my uncle for the rest of his life. Bert dwelt on him as if this death were his responsibility, or as if he, a Jew from South Africa, might somehow have brought this handsome young man, Hitler’s model Aryan, back to the life denied him. The dead man inhabited his dreams. Bert thought that he should have kept the letters, for some reason, perhaps to return them to a bereaved mother in Hamburg. He was a link in a circle that never closed.
Bellagio also marked him. He returned four days after his first visit, on May 11, 1945, and was billeted for a week in the magnificent Villa Gerly, on the banks of the lake. His diary records a lunch that day at Silvio’s restaurant. “We lunched sumptuously on fresh trout and fresh butter,” Bert wrote. “Such food was so novel and so exciting to our palates long jaded by M and V that I for one ate far too much.” Canned meat and vegetables (M and V), tasting of neither, were the staple military diet. After lunch Bert dozed off on the grass, a siesta troubled only by ants. In the late afternoon he decided to go for a swim:
We rowed out into the middle of the lake and there I plunged in. The water was icy cold a few feet below the surface. About halfway I realized I had overestimated my swimming ability and underestimated the distance. The swim turned into a horrifying ordeal. I was fighting panic, not with complete success. It is one thing to be able to take a grip if you can stop and weigh up the situation but quite another if you can’t stop to collect your calm. I couldn’t stop. It would have been better to have doggy paddled and relaxed but driving panic made my haste frantic. I was exhausted when I reached the shore. My heart was pounding and my head was bursting with pain. It was quite the most unnerving and terrifying experience I have had since I left home.
In this way, four days after the end of the war, Captain Cohen almost lost his life in Bellagio. He would have gone out in a sumptuous manner, after a lunch of delicious fish, in the midst of a beautiful lake, beneath the mountains, a few hundred yards from the Punto Spartivento. It is a good thing, however, that he did not encounter a watery North Italian grave. What a waste, people would have said, to die when the war was over. As if the war being over made any difference to the waste and the grief. The thing about life’s chains, and the lines of memory that eddy along them, is you never know when they may get broken—in a mountainous trench, on a bend in the river, or three hundred meters down in a sunlit lake after a good lunch celebrating peace.
Excerpted from The Girl from Human Street by Roger Cohen. Copyright © 2015 by Roger Cohen. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
A vivid family memoir, focusing on belonging versus a sense of "otherness", the vagaries of memory, and more.
By Kcorn
Here's the conundrum I faced with this book: I loved reading it and yet some of the chapters seemed disconnected from both the title and the main themes implied by that title - Jewish identity, experiences, memory, alienation and belonging. When author Roger Cohen addressed these topics, he made many thought-provoking points. He noted that memory may be tailored to fit our political and emotional needs, and often focused on aspects of belonging versus a sense of "otherness." He wrote very poignantly about how he missed meeting "the last Jew in Zagare, Lithuania by only months ". This was in 2011). I struggled to imagine how it must feel to be the sole Jew left in a town once known as "a center of of Jewish learning and Kaballah."
However, there are also chapters which focus only the the author's family members and seem less clearly connected to the other parts of the book. One chapter, titled "Madness in the Brain, centers on the author's mother, a woman who suffered from manic-depression. Because issues of mental illness and treatment interest me, my attention never flagged while reading this chapter. I was often moved by the author's description of his mother's devastating ordeal and his conclusion that " Mental illness is a charnel house from which nobody escapes unscathed."
But I did wonder if other readers might be confused or find these sections less cohesive than the rest of the book. The bottom line? I found this to be a thoroughly engaging book. For those looking solely for a memoir focused on family and individual Jewish identity, history, and related themes, it might be helpful to know that some chapters strongly veer from those topics and address mental health issues, particularly manic-depressive illness.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Haunting, sad, slow at times, but ultimately very satisfying
By A reader
This takes the reader on a compelling journey through varied territory: from Italy at the end of World War II to Lithuania at the time of the horrific mass murders of Jews, to South Africa where tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews relocated in the wake of pogroms and intolerance, hoping to get in on the gold rush near the turn of the twentieth century; to England where the author lived, to the United States; and eventually, to Israel. Roger Cohen, a New York Times correspondent, covers a wide range of topics as he tells the complex stories of his family members over the last century. We learn along the way about his family, the war, the particular brand of hideousness with which the Lithuanian Jews were systematically eliminated, the conditions for Jews in South Africa back then and through the twentieth century (he discusses apartheid, Jewish silence about apartheid, Jewish activism, and more recent political forces) the challenges of relocating anywhere, whether as a refugee or not; conditions in Israel, a bit of history about the Israeli/Palestinian situation, a comparison of that conflict with conditions of apartheid, Cohen's modified take on Zionism, what it was and is like for people to live so close to regular terrorist bombings, Israel's retaliation and its effects on Palestinians, and the need for a healthy, democratic Jewish state where all are treated fairly and with respect. We also read about his mother's very unfortunate mental illness and various struggles that other family members endured.
That's a lot of material for one book, and the writing bogs down a bit here and there with intricate detail, particularly in the detailed stories about Cohen's extended family. However, I really was particularly grateful to read about LIthuania, having read extensively about the countries surrounding it. The chapters on the Jewish community in South Africa are fascinating, and I found Cohen's opinions about Israel compelling, well thought out, and beautifully communicated. Cohen's writing is sometimes matter of fact, sometimes a bit melodramatic, sometimes poetic, and almost always gripping.
This book takes a bit of patience to get through, but in the end, it is well worth it. I feel that I learned a great deal from reading "The Girl from Human Street," and look forward to reading some of the sources referred to in the notes.
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
A Quest and Discoveries
By Lita Perna
This is a quest; a story of displacement of place and identity, and a search for meaning. This is also the story about the author's search for answers about his mother's bipolar mental illness; her unexplained absences when he was young; the stays in asylums and sanatoriums, her depression and her suicide attempts.
Cohen writes, "She veers from the shrill to the shrinking. My mother could be impossible; when she was not impossible, she was heartbreaking."
Author, Roger Cohen was born in London, taken to South Africa as an infant and returned to London 18 months later and he grew up there and became an American and moved to New York.
Cohen's grandparents emigrated to South Africa in the late 1800's from small towns in Lithuania whose Jewish residents were later murdered by the Nazis. The author tells in excruciatingly details, the story of his family and the history of the times and places that shaped them. He visits what's left of the Lithuania towns as he seeks stories from those who lived through the Nazi and Russian rules, and who still remain. Cohen writes of atrocities in his grandparent's former town; how the women were forced to abort pregnancies; how Jews were rounded up; how Jews killed newborn infants. Cohen's family looks to the future and tries to forge new identities diluting meaning from their pasts.
We learn about Jews in South Africa who migrated there at the same time that many Jews came to the United States. We learn of their struggles and successes. Cohen writes about Apartheid and how most Jews looked the other way. When a rabbi Unger, a Holocaust survivor condemns white supremacy in the South African Jewish community, it makes them uneasy. He is ordered by the Interior Ministry to leave South Africa. "The Jewish community does not lift a finger over his expulsion."
I was exhausted and overwhelmed by plowing through details that will delight other readers and members of Cohen's family. The book may have felt like an emotional catharsis for the author, but it was a struggle for me to digest all the details and names and relations, and to maintain interest. The book was often a burden to read, was dry, and was difficult at times to follow.
Roger Cohen is brave for telling this highly personal story. He writes, "The only way back to mindfulness and wholeness has been writing down the world as I see it. Words alone bring me to a single voice, a unified being, and an inner peace."
Through Roger Cohen's story we learn about the journeys and the struggles that it took for him to arrive at this place of peace.
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