The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.90 (750 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B00RNDP73W |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 564 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-12-30 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"Poignant, beautifully crafted Jewish family saga" according to Keith Wheelock. I found this book a page turner, beautifully written with superb research and reporting. It is impossible to grasp fully such complex, multi-layered narrative in a single reading.On one level I found it an extraordinary saga of a Jewish family's history--displacement, assimilation, prejudice, survival, and expressing human love and anguish. Cohen dwelt on lost memories and how families often kept silent about familial history. One might wonder why he dwelt so heavily on the Lithuanian heritage that he family had left and seemingly ignored generations before Cohen was born. I found this essential to the overall story of an uprooti. "Deeply moving, beautifully-written and accurate account of the South African Jewish experience, across generations & continents" according to eric hassall. 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 thisCohen's parents emigrate from Johannesburg to London, and his mother, June Cohen, develops a severe depressive illness. Mr Cohen postulates that that his mother's dislocation from a warm, loving family, an easy-going life in sunny privileged-under-apartheid South Africa, to grim grey post-war London, was a major contributor to the development of her depressive ill. Ignore the Times review MM Cohen succeeds in conveying the history of his family as it relocates from a small shtetl in Lithuania to South Africa at the turn of the century. He does so with accurate depiction of Jewish life in the new country against the background of the Afrikana control of the vast black population. Into this story he weaves, skillfully, the descriptions of family members, their personalities, foibles and differing attitudes to their new homeland.After World War II, a new chapter opens as the Cohen family leaves for England and he explains in most personal terms, his parents decision to move out of South Africa and make their home in Lon
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. 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. 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.. 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. He explores the pervasive Jewish sense of "otherness" and finds it has been a significant factor in his family's history of manic depression