The New York Times columnist, Roger Cohen, remembers the life of his family in South Africa, particularly his mother June, The Girl from Human Street, writes Robyn Sassen.
THE GIRL FROM HUMAN STREET: GHOSTS OF MEMORY IN A JEWISH FAMILY (Bloomsbury) by Roger Cohen
A young man, a captain in the Dental Unit of the 6th South African Armoured Division, opens this extraordinary book. It is 1945, Italy, and he comes eye to eye with the body of a German soldier his own age: it’s an encounter that opens up a litany of psychological and spiritual demons, causes and contradictions that contribute to the human condition.
It is on this conflation of beauty and horror, life and death, logic and illogic that Roger Cohen’s book focuses. These stories upon stories, premised on letters, diary entries and contextual research, define the texture of a book that is so beautifully constructed and honed that you want to read it slowly to savour it.
But you don’t: the words flow with a simple unpretentiousness, leaving you touched and changed – and wishing that Cohen’s family presented more detours that required his focus.
The central concern of this book is a tribute to Cohen’s mother, June, the girl from Human Street.
She a woman who existed in the cusp between South Africa and Britain, and in the bottomless pit of depression that began postpartum and took her through all the harsh indignities of treatment by electro-shock, de rigueur at the time, as well as isolation and silence on the part of her young family.
Although there is a detailed and empathetic account of June’s illness, the book is about so much more, affording June an inimitable, dignified presence in Cohen’s life, and enabling her to be a prism through which he contemplates the world and the context in which he has become who he is.
This book skirts self-indulgence. We are exposed to personal snippets from Cohen’s diaries and, instead of being exposed to great clumps of anecdote, we are taken on the journeys of other relatives or contemporaries.
Cohen writes with a developed perspicuity and poetry, his language richly blending everything from historical fact to private story.
The Girl from Human Street is one of those books you need in your life: it engages with the multiheaded bizarreness that it takes to be a human being in this world. Governed and formed by boundary, it is a compelling read. It is the kind of book that leaves you with a hollow sense of loss because Cohen’s words ring with such freshness and sanity, you want more of them in your head.
For full review by Robyn Sassen go to the Mail & Guardian
