New York Times columnist Roger Cohen's THE GIRL FROM HUMAN STREET is a tragic, beautiful memoir that views the displacement of the Jewish people in the 20th century through the lens of his own mother's struggle with mental illness after leaving her South African home to start a new life in London.

The "girl" of the book's title is June (Adler) Cohen, born on Human Street in the once-prosperous gold mining town of Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg, in 1929. The daughter of a physician father and a mother whose family helped found what became South Africa's first chain of department stores, she was a "child of privilege," who flourished in the warm sun of that country. After marrying a doctor, the son of Lithuanian emigrants who abandoned their homeland for South Africa as the 19th century passed into the 20th, she moved with him to England, where Cohen was born in 1955.

Cohen frankly concedes that his family thrived under the apartheid regime of his mother's beloved birthplace. Although Jews were not entirely free from discrimination, he notes, "with its vast black underclass, South Africa afforded ample space for Jews with acumen to get ahead." Despite notable exceptions like Rabbi André Ungar, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, and Helen Suzman, a member of Parliament and an anti-apartheid activist, most South African Jews at best were indifferent to the evils of apartheid (known euphemistically as "TWOL" for "traditional way of life"). Cohen describes how black servants worked for his grandparents and recounts obliquely some of his own efforts as a young man to cross the impregnable color barrier.

"Roger Cohen's THE GIRL FROM HUMAN STREET is a tragic, beautiful memoir that views the displacement of the Jewish people in the 20th century through the lens of his own mother's struggle with mental illness after leaving her South African home to start a new life in London."

Cohen is clear in his belief that his mother's departure from South Africa triggered the manic depression that scarred the last four decades of her life, a struggle that included electroshock therapy treatments before age 30 and suicide attempts in 1978 and 1982. While he reveals a history of mental illness in her family, he sees her story as part of "a Jewish odyssey of the twentieth century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing and forgetting." For people like June, "[n]ew opportunity is only one side of the immigrant story, its bright star. The other side, its black sun, is displacement and loss."

As a proxy for what might have been the story of his ancestors had they remained behind in their Lithuanian town, Cohen recounts the harrowing tale of George Gordimer, born in Šiauliai, his mother's ancestral home, and now living in New Jersey. In 1943, at age five, George hid in a barrel to escape a mass transport of children for extermination, one of many in a country where some 70 percent of the Jewish population was eradicated by December 1941. One can't read this story without appreciating, as Cohen clearly does, the role pure chance in electing to emigrate played in determining who lived and who died. It certainly was not any foresight about a looming catastrophe that led Cohen's ancestors to join the "hustlers at the new frontier" in the Johannesburg gold rush of the 1890s, but that choice likely spared them the fate of most of their fellow Lithuanian Jews.

Cohen, now an American citizen, also traces his path and that of other members of his family across the globe. "Trees have roots. Jews have legs," he succinctly observes. But with their dispersion and emancipation came a weakening of traditional religious ties, and the "price of the loss of Jewish ritual," he suggests, was the "progressive emptying of the ceremonies that gave cohesion and purpose." He devotes a chapter to the story of an Israeli cousin, Rena (not her real name), who struggled with some of the same psychic demons that haunted his mother. Rena's distress over Israel's relations with the Palestinians gives Cohen an opportunity to express his own views on the politics of the Middle East.

Describing himself as an "atheist and liberal Zionist," Cohen abandons the constraints of memoir near the end of the book. While he is unsparing in his criticism of Israel, he's equally emphatic that its "oppression of the Palestinians does not constitute apartheid reborn in the Holy Land." After concluding that the "hidden agenda" of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement is the destruction of the Jewish state, he acknowledges the need for a Jewish national home, one that only can exist alongside a Palestinian state. The alternative, he says, is "conflict without end." There will be readers entranced by Cohen's family portrait who will be dismayed by these political prescriptions, but long experience as a foreign correspondent in the region and postings in strife-torn places like Beirut and Bosnia give him the credibility to express those views.

"My mother had no safe place where she could learn to contend," Cohen concludes. "She had no sanctuary. She was a transplant that did not take. Fresh soil invigorated my father. It overwhelmed my mother in the end. Too much of her was left behind in South Africa." In THE GIRL FROM HUMAN STREET, he brings to bear his skill as a journalist and his empathy as a loving son to make that sad case in this touching portrait of identity and loss.