The Girl from Human Street - by Roger Cohen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In his intimate and profoundly moving Jewish family history--a memoir of displacement, prejudice, hope, despair, and love--award-winning New York Times columnist Roger Cohen turns a compassionate and discerning eye on the legacy of his own forebears. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the present day, Cohen tracks his family's story of repeated upheaval, four generations of wandering from pre-Shoah Lithuania to apartheid-era South Africa, and then to England, the United States, and Israel.

At the heart of Cohen's story is the powerful bond he had with his mother, the "girl" forced to travel far from home. Tormented by a deep depression yet stoic in her struggle, she embodied her son's complex inheritance. Graceful, honest, and sweeping, The Girl from Human Street is a remarkable chronicle of the quest for belonging across generations, a gripping saga, and a resonant portrait of identity and memory in the modern age.

Review Quotes

"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