The Girl from Human Street

Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family

By: Roger Cohen

Narrated by: Simon Vance

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.

Cohen 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.

©2015 Original material by Roger Cohen. Recorded by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Publishing Group, a division of Random House , Inc. (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A bit disjointed

I really wanted to like this novel. I heard a review on NPR and it sounded incredibly interesting. However, between the somewhat monotonous narrator and the way that the story was presented, it was incredibly difficult to keep track of the family. That said, I did enjoy learning some of the historic aspects of the book.

Too hard to follow

Maybe it’s me or maybe this would have been more easily tackled in print form but Cohen jumps through countries, time, and sides of his family. I was completely lost most of the time regarding who he was speaking of and how the person related to him. All of it was devastating and beautifully written but I couldn’t finish it.