The girl from resonantly named Human Street, in Johannesburg, South Africa, is Roger Cohen's late mother. As lovingly recalled by her son, a New York Times columnist, June Cohen is a woman of beauty, brilliance, and allure. But being a doctor's wife in chilly, stodgy mid- twentieth-century England doesn't suit her. At times, it breaks her, and she spirals downward into depression.
In Cohen's view, June suffers from two maladies, each accentuating the other: a wrenching sense of displacement from the warm, communal South Africa of her youth and what today's medicine calls bipolar disorder. Both ailments, we come to learn, are congenital and familial.
Cohen's extended family, with roots and branches in Lithuania, England, South Africa, Italy, Israel, and the United States, reenacts the traditional drama of Jewish wandering and exile — a sort of tribal haunting. The other, even more unwelcome family ghost is recurrent mental illness: Depression and manic depression regularly afflict the writer's maternal relatives, with devastating, occasionally fatal consequences.
The interweaving of these two themes, of exile and illness, is the loose ordering principle of this complex, ambitious, meandering, and intermittently eloquent work. Ambition may indeed be the fatal flaw of The Girl from Human Street. Cohen doesn't achieve sufficient narrative mastery to link the book's diverse, individually interesting strands — touching on politics, history, and his far-flung family — into a powerful whole.
The problem emerges early on. A longtime foreign correspondent and foreign editor for the Times, Cohen has a penchant for travel, armchair journeys included. The memoir's opening pages lurch around dizzily in time and space, foreshadowing aspects of both Cohen's story and his storytelling, but stalling the book's momentum.
The Girl from Human Street begins in the near-present, in the lovely Italian town of Bellagio on Lake Como, with the author speculating on his career ("a journalist's life is agitation") and declaring that "violent nationalism is revived memory manipulation as revealed truth." He also informs us that the only story he can know is his own: "Being a Jewish story of the twentieth century, it bears upon migration and displacement and suicide and persecution and assimilation. It also recounts bravery, a passionate quest for learning, obstinate love, and the pursuit of beauty."
We flash back to 1945, still in Bellagio, with Cohen's paternal uncle, Bert Cohen, a dentist (and diarist) serving with a South African armored division in the Allied advance against the Nazis. Uncle Bert is haunted by letters he finds on a German corpse, which he wishes he had pocketed and returned to the bereaved family. He also exults in fresh lake trout and almost drowns in Como's icy waters.
Cohen doesn't linger, though, shifting the scene to Lithuania, the birthplace of three of his grandparents — and the site of mass killings of Jews during the Holocaust. Next, we are whisked to the family's new home in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Sydney Cohen, the author's father, is born. As a young doctor, he meets June Adler, the privileged daughter of a wealthy mercantile family, whom he will wed, take to England, and love as best he can through the trials of her erratic mental health.
Much of the memoir proceeds in a similarly disjointed fashion. Cohen takes one long detour into the life of an unrelated Lithuanian Holocaust survivor. He discusses the Jewish role in the oppression and eventual liberation of black South Africans; contrasts "genteel" British anti- Semitism with the more vicious creed that drove Eastern European pogroms and Nazi genocide, and ruminates on present-day tensions between Palestinians and Israelis. He also devotes several pages to the travails of a pseudonymous cousin.
But the memoir comes most alive when Cohen writes about his immediate family, and especially his mother, whose unwitting abandonment he says shaped his emotional choices. In a moving reverie, the twice-married Cohen imagines himself telling his mother: "In the end I always had to punish those who tried to love me, avenge myself somehow for the bereavement you caused. . . . "
In the era before lithium, June's depression and suicide attempts exposed her to "cures" as violent as her disease: insulin coma therapy and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) administered without anesthesia or muscle relaxants. Even at home, shocked out of her worst despair, she was often less than engaged with her family. "The locked doors were a bulkhead against the eruption of the uncontrollable," Cohen writes. In response, his father, Sydney, could seem overwhelmed, emotionally distant, "gone and unreachable much of the time."
In the end, it is cancer that claims, but does not conquer, Cohen's mother. "In death, against all odds, it was love that prevailed," he writes. In a ravishingly beautiful eulogy, he says: "Through her extraordinary stoicism, dignity, and patience, she wrestled down the demons — monsters we cannot even begin to imagine — and vanquished them in the end. This was her most painful and her greatest victory. In gaining it her spirit became so strong that this final passage was almost painless."
His father later writes Cohen and tells him that this tribute will always be his finest hour — and it is certainly his book's finest moment.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.
Reviewer: Julia M. Klein
10/27/2014
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.)
12/01/2014
Journalist Cohen (New York Times; Soldiers and Slaves) presents a sprawling, multifaceted memoir that delves deeply into his family history, his mother's struggle with mental illness, and broader issues of Jewish identity, history, culture, and belonging within a wider diaspora. With his mother, June, firmly at the center of his tale, the author ably weaves disparate threads of his ancestors' stories, tracing their paths from Lithuania to apartheid-era South Africa, and eventually his family's settlement in England, where June's bipolar disorder emerged. VERDICT 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. Readers interested in Jewish immigration narratives may also consider Lucette Lagnado's The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. [See Prepub Alert, 7/21/14.]—Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI
★ 2014-10-20
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 coexistence—of the kind white and black South Africans have slowly worked toward—becomes a reality. With limpid prose, Cohen delivers a searching and profoundly moving memoir.
