The girl from Human Street
Subtitle: ghosts of memory in a Jewish family
By: Roger Cohen
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780307594662
Subjects: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Family; Jews; Biography
Description: An expansive yet intimate memoir of modern Jewish identity, following the diaspora of the author's own family to assay the impact of memory, displacement, and disquiet. 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. 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 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. He explores the pervasive Jewish sense of "otherness" and finds it has been a significant factor in his family's history of manic depression. 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--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Circle of disquiet; title: Bones in the forest; title: Gin and two; title: In the barrel; title: Chateau Michel; title: Picnic in a cemetery; title: Patient number 9413; title: Jews in a whisper; title: Madness in the brain; title: The lark sings and falls; title: Death in the Holy Land; title: The ghosts of repetition; title: A single chain.