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

Cohen, Roger

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0307594661 ISBN 13: 9780307594662

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2015

Riassunto

An intimate and profoundly moving Jewish family history—a story of displacement, prejudice, hope, despair, and love.

In this luminous memoir, award-winning New York Times columnist Roger Cohen turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own forebears. As he follows them across continents and decades, mapping individual lives that diverge and intertwine, vital patterns of struggle and resilience, valued heritage and evolving loyalties (religious, ethnic, national), converge into a resonant portrait of cultural identity in the modern age.

Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the present day, Cohen tracks his family’s story of repeated upheaval, from Lithuania to South Africa, and then to England, the United States, and Israel. It is a tale of otherness marked by overt and latent anti-Semitism, but also otherness as a sense of inheritance. We see Cohen’s family members grow roots in each adopted homeland even as they struggle to overcome the loss of what is left behind and to adapt—to the racism his parents witness in apartheid-era South Africa, to the familiar ostracism an uncle from Johannesburg faces after fighting against Hitler across Europe, to the ambivalence an Israeli cousin experiences when tasked with policing the occupied West Bank.
At the heart of The Girl from Human Street is the powerful and touching relationship between Cohen and his mother, that “girl.” Tortured by the upheavals in her life yet stoic in her struggle, she embodies her son’s complex inheritance.

Graceful, honest, and sweeping, Cohen’s remarkable chronicle of the quest for belonging across generations contributes an important chapter to the ongoing narrative of Jewish life.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"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 in The 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 Street is 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

L'autore:

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 includeSoldiers and Slaves and Hearts Grown Brutal. He lives in London.

@NYTimesCohen

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0307594661
• ISBN 13: 9780307594662
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 304