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Chargement... The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Familypar Roger Cohen
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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-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)940.53History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- World War IIClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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The book is beautifully written, though I sometimes found it a bit flowery, and prefer plainer prose. It's hard to characterize what the book is about- partly it focuses on Jewish wanderings and persecution, making the point that Jews can never really assimilate, no matter how hard they try (and Cohen himself is an atheist). But then much of the book is about his mother's Bipolar Disorder and the mental illness that courses through his family; he spends a big chunk of the latter part of the book on his Israeli cousin who also suffered from the disease.
The most moving part is Cohen's description of the impact on him and his sister, growing up with a distant father and a mother with unpredictable mood swings and little capacity to care for them.
A good read, anyway, but I think it could have been shorter and focused more on one thing or the other. ( )