Review by New York Times Review
IN THE YEARS around the turn of the 20th century, Roger Cohen's family joined the mass exodus of Jews out of their long, mostly dismal residency in the Pale of Settlement. Like thousands of their Lithuanian landsmen, Cohen's relatives headed for the sunny, still-undeveloped, resource-rich country of South Africa. In this new world they began with nothing, worked hard and achieved much. As is often true of successful immigrant families, their grandchildren could live as though the old world had never been. Cohen's father became a doctor, his mother was college educated. Both were raised with the comforts that only numerous servants can provide: "They never had to boil an egg," Cohen writes. Being a Jew in South Africa was not unlike being a Jew in the American South: Anti-Semitism was not absent, but it was greatly mitigated by a segregated black underclass all but legally enslaved. In "The Girl From Human Street," his memoir of his extended family, Cohen, for many years a foreign correspondent and currently a columnist for The New York Times, places the particular experiences of his relations in a large historical frame. "The stories I sought were the small ones that revealed large ones," he writes. "I looked for history as reflected in a single psyche, the imprint of the past." His mother June's long struggle with manic depression is the thread that holds this very wide-ranging story together. June Adler and Sydney Cohen married in Johannesburg in 1950. For the sake of his career they soon moved to bleak postwar London, where their first child, Roger, was born. Two years later, when she was pregnant with her daughter, June experienced the onset of the debilitating depression that would alternate with episodes of mania for the rest of her life. Psychiatric treatments, including the primitive electroshock therapy of the day, were largely ineffective, and twice during the course of her life June made attempts at suicide. Was June Cohen's illness simply the luck of the genetic draw, the predisposition to mental instability that did, in fact, run on both sides of her family? Her doctors thought so, and so did her husband, who drew up a genealogical chart that pinpointed five instances of the mental disease on both direct lines of June's family. Her son is not persuaded. He attributes his mother's condition to the stress of her uprooting from a sheltered life in South Africa, with "its sunlit ease and its tight-knit Jewish community." And behind that, he sees an epic: "I also came to the conviction that the truth of the story of my mother... was tied to our odyssey, a Jewish odyssey of the 20th century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing and forgetting." This intuition, which he extends to encompass the general angst of Jews everywhere, moves Cohen to retrace the odyssey of his family. He travels to the Lithuanian shtetls of Zagare and Siauliai where his family originated, and recounts the story of the Holocaust in Zagare, where more than 2,000 Jews were slaughtered on an autumn day in 1941. Here he meets a son of the lone Jew who continued to live in Zagare after the war. The man tells Cohen that his father never spoke about what had happened. "The times were like this," he says. "The times were like this," Cohen repeats, and he adds: "There were many such postwar Jewish silences," originating, he says, in the shame of survival. "I lived in one." Maybe so, the reader thinks, but is it really comparable? Cohen returns to modern South Africa, where many of his relatives still live, and reviews the paradox of Jewish life under apartheid. Some of his relatives would later ally themselves with the movement against apartheid; others were content to benefit from it: "Thank God for the blacks," a Cohen family friend said. "If not for them, it would be us." Cohen also travels to Israel, where some of his relatives have settled In particular he meets "a lovely cousin with an old family curse" who will end her life a suicide. He meditates on the Holocaust, on the necessity for the formation of the state of Israel and on the tribulations of Palestinians and Jews that have inevitably followed. He goes to England to review his family's life there - the pressures of assimilation, the attendant loss of Jewish identity, the pervasive, not always polite level of antiSemitism in that country. In his travels from place to place, in his movements through time, in his references to people and events, Cohen makes free-associative leaps, forgoing the transitional signposts that would orient his reader. This results in a disjointed journey, often leaving one confused and struggling to follow. And in his instructive meditations on history and Jewish life, Cohen has cast his net so widely that he catches virtually the entire 20th century. His original rationale is all but swamped: Can everything be implicated in June Cohen's illness? The sincerity of Cohen's feeling for his family cannot be doubted, although too often he subverts it by overwriting. His mother's upbringing in South Africa was "like the Cape watermelons, bright green as sugarcane, opening to yield their vermilion flesh." And in his eagerness to make his family's experiences part of a larger historical story, Cohen reaches very far. As, for instance, when he tells us the story of one George Gordimer: On the day the Nazis came for the Jewish children of Siauliai, 5-year-old Gordimer was hidden, first in a barrel, then in a dark cellar. When it was safe for the boy to emerge from hiding, his town had no Jewish children; a population numbering more than 700 had disappeared, seized by the Nazis and transported for extermination. Gordimer survived, but in his adult life in New Jersey he suffered from many ailments, including depression; he did not talk about the past, or even about being a Jew. Cohen writes: "My mother was spared the Nazi terror Gordimer endured. ... She was not, however, spared the strain of upheaval, displacement and fear.... She, too, faced the things not talked about." Roger Cohen's family left Lithuania more than three decades before the Nazis marched in. When his mother was 5, George Gordimer's age when he was hiding from the Nazis, she was a happy, coddled child in South Africa. Her son acknowledges that June Cohen was not a survivor of the Holocaust, but he nevertheless makes the equation. In linking his mother's suffering to that of George Gordimer, he inflates the one, diminishes the other and has bent history to his purpose. The title of Cohen's book - referring to the actual street where his mother once lived - seems intended to be read as a metaphor, as in: We all come from Human Street. But George Gordimer and June Cohen did not come from the same street, and barely from the same world. Where a Jew lived during World War II made all the difference. Sometimes a street is just a street, sometimes a gene is just a gene and sometimes history gives you a break. Cohen places the particular experiences of his family in a large historical frame. DOROTHY GALLAGHER is the author of a family memoir, "How I Came Into My Inheritance." Her most recent book is "Lillian Heilman: An Imperious Life."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 1, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Sit on the fence and people get killed behind it. The many readers of New York Times columnist Cohen will recognize the plain talk and passionate commitment, as well as the insightful, sometimes controversial commentary on crucial contemporary issues. And the wit. Rooted in his extended family's immigration story, especially that of his mother (who, moved from South Africa to London, became mentally ill, and attempted suicide in 1978), he addresses here the role of Jews in twentieth-century history, from Eastern Europe to South Africa to Britain to Israel. Never simplistic, he acknowledges that under apartheid most Jews looked on and kept quiet. As a child, he heard it Thank God for the blacks. If not for them, it would be us even as he points out the strong Jewish role in anti-apartheid resistance. Later, in Israel, his immigrant family split over the Occupation. Sure to spark debate, the often-painful immigration story stays with you, about then and now: As a child, trust was a stranger . . . . I had to look both ways. --Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a lyrical, digressive tracking of mental illness in his far-flung family, New York Times columnist Cohen (Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis Final Gamble) explores the tentacles of repressed memory in Jewish identity. Cohen's grandparents on both sides came from Lithuanian shtetls and migrated at the end of the 19th century to South Africa. From modest beginnings as grocers and roving peddlers, they gradually prospered as business leaders and professionals in Johannesburg, far from the calamity of Nazi Germany. Cohen's father, a doctor in Krugersdorp, settled in London after WWII, bringing his South African wife, June, née Adler; assimilation was the rule of the day, and the horrors of Auschwitz were not discussed. "Better to look forward, work hard, say little," Cohen, born in the mid-1950s, writes. Paralyzing depression dogged his mother, requiring hospitalization and electroconvulsive therapy, and she made several suicide attempts over the years. Her manic depression was shared by other members of the family, which Cohen traces to being "tied to... a Jewish odyssey of the 20th century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing, and forgetting." Cohen writes eloquently of the great looming irony of apartheid for the once similarly persecuted, now privileged Jews of South African, as well as the divisive oppression in Israel. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, he muses on his own migrations spurred by "buried truths." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
New York Times columnist Cohen chronicles his Jewish family's flight from Lithuania to South Africa, then to England, and finally to the United States. Members of the family, the author in particular, suffer from both overt and covert anti-Semitism. His parents and other family members are ashamed of being Jewish and try to eradicate their Jewish identity. Cohen lovingly tells the story of his mother's struggle with mental illness and the feeling of not belonging no matter where she lives. Simon Vance expertly narrates the book with a clear, English-accented pronunciation. Verdict Recommended for the memoir and Jewish identity collections of all libraries. ["Cohen's nonchronological structure, sometimes elusive prose, and tendency to circle back to topics may challenge some readers. However, his creative approach to the genre form, deeply considered views, and candor will yield poignant rewards for thoughtful memoir fans interested in Jewish history, the modern Jewish experience, issues of displacement and immigration, or family struggles to cope with mental illness," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ 12/14.]-Ilka Gordon, Beachwood, OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In an effort to understand the modern Jewish experience, distinguished New York Times columnist Cohen (Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble, 2005, etc.) examines his family history of displacement, despair and resilience.The author has always prided himself on confronting the truth in his writing, but he knew that his work allowed him to escape the more difficult task of articulating a deeper personal truth. In this honest and lucid book, the British-born Cohen tells how his Lithuanian Jewish ancestors came to South Africa. Tolerated by white South Africans because they were also white-skinned, the author's relatives made prosperous lives as business people while avoiding the fate of millions of other Jews in Nazi Europe. Despite their successes, however, members of both sides of his family were plagued by mental illness. The genes that caused it "formed an unbroken chain with the past," which many of them tried to ignore. Cohen focuses in particular on the tragic story of his mother, June. Gifted and beautiful, she was also bipolar. When she and her family relocated to London, her symptoms surfaced and remained with her for the rest of her life. Cohen links June's unraveling with her sense of being a stranger in a strange land. Like one of his mother's relatives who ended up in Israel and eventually committed suicide, "[June] was a transplant who did not take." All too aware of how many South African Jews turned a blind eye to the problem of apartheid in South Africa, Cohen also examines Israel's evolution into a colonial nation that oppresses Arab minorities. Millennia of persecution and eternal exile has made a Jewish homeland a necessity, yet Israel will never fully succeed as a state until peaceful coexistenceof the kind white and black South Africans have slowly worked towardbecomes a reality. With limpid prose, Cohen delivers a searching and profoundly moving memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
