The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family - Tapa dura

"Empathetic and far-reaching... The imaginative empathy that he brings even to the secondary figures depicted here...is sometimes breathtaking... Cohen's book is written with a generosity that is truly humane."
The New York Review of Books
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

There is so much to admire inThe Girl from Human Street. Cohen[ s] suggestion that certain depressive natures are triggered, or more to the point, haunted, by their immigrant history, is profound. His memoir will linger in any reader s memory.
USA Today

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
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
The Girl from Human Street has important things to say, things that can perhaps only be said by a Jewish author. Cohen s book is brave, honorable and enlightened. It is also beautifully written.
The Telegraph
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
[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
Cohen...explores the tentacles of repressed memory in Jewish identity .Thoughtful, wide-ranging, he muses on his own migrations spurred by buried truths.
Publishers Weekly
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
Many others have written stories of their family s roots and journeys, but Cohen s work stands out for his poetic and powerful prose.
The Jewish Week
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
Vibrant, unusual and staunchly poignant .It is in fact not one, but many books: a lingering, evocative memoir, a gripping narrative, a shrewd socioeconomic history of South Africa, Britain, Israel, the US and Eastern Europe, a piercing philosophical analysis of the ethics of memory, of belonging to a story. It is quite unflinchingly an inquiry into the moral prerequisites of being human.
Bookanista
Honest and lucid With limpid prose, Cohen delivers a searching and profoundly moving memoir.
Kirkus, starred review
Insightful, sometimes controversial commentary on crucial contemporary issues.
Booklist
A gifted journalist, who has powerfully conveyed the grief of the bereft in various international trouble spots, here wrestles with his own grief for a mother who suffered through episodes of suicidal depression. This turns into a quest for core values in a family history spanning three continents, in which one uprooting led to the next.Many readers will find a mirror in Roger Cohen s layered, ambitious, haunting book.
Joseph Lelyveld, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
Roger Cohen has given us a profound and powerful book, gripping from start to finish.The story of his Jewish family s suffering and success, from Lithuania before the Shoah to South Africa, London and Tel Aviv today, features fierce battles against external demons (Hitler, Stalin, pervasive anti-Semitism) and the internal demons of depression and displacement.Wise and reflective, The Girl from Human Streetis memoir at its finest.
Fritz Stern, author of Five Germanys I Have Known
Roger Cohen captures a century s upheavals in his moving, thoughtful, and well-written family saga.
Henry A. Kissinger
Roger Cohen s great-grandfather once expressed the wish that every person might truly know that all of creation from the sand granule to the shining star is connected like one chain. I wish he could read his great-grandson's book and experience how powerfully it initiates us into that extraordinary awareness. Beautifully written and deeply moving, The Girl from Human Street is 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
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
Roger Cohen has written an absorbing, haunting voyage around the Jewish twentieth century. A book full of loss and love, it charts the intense, universal need to belong a need so great, it can lead to despair and even a kind of madness. It is more than the story of one family. It is the story of a need that makes us human.
Jonathan Freedland, columnist, The Guardian"