Of all the stories in this book, two stand out, unforgettable. One is this description – in the mind’s eye – of a son’s anguish for his mother: “I see my slight, fragrant young mother with metal plates being affixed to either side of her head, flattening her dark curls, her heart racing as a doctor straps the plates to her swabbed temples, enclosing her skull in its high-voltage carapace.” The other is Roger Cohen’s discovery of his mother’s admission sheet at the Victorian mental hospital in Surrey – now a luxury gated-housing development – where the electric shock treatment was administered in 1958 (as Cohen discovered half a century later). The registry names her, and in the box marked ‘Religion’ reads simply: JEW. “The noun form” writes Cohen, “has a weight the adjective, Jewish, lacks. It seems loaded with monosyllabic distaste, redoubled by the strange use of the upper case.”
This is a book with three strands. Above all, it tells the story of Cohen’s mother, June. It also tells the story of his family, from its origins in Lithuania, via South Africa to Britain and Israel. And its riptide is Cohen’s own journey towards the identity he feels to have fled, but then found, as a Jew himself. But first, I must declare an interest: when I was 12, I attended a good school in Hampstead that was mostly Jewish, partly for reasons of geography, partly because of quotas.
Across the road from that school lived a brilliant, apparently confident and very amusing Jewish boy, 364 days younger than me, who commuted to Westminster as a weekly boarder, rather than walk a dozen steps every day to the mostly Jewish school. I thought this weird – and now his deeply personal book explains why he did it. This was Roger Cohen, and we have known each other ever since.
Roger’s opening theme is that he has been running all his life – “running away from something” – but from what? In Roger’s case two things: the eternal alienation – at some level, either subtle or genocidal – of Jewry; and June’s demon, call it what you will: manic depression, or “madness in the brain”, as Coleridge wrote in Christabel, and as cited by June herself in her diary. In the story of June Cohen they are inseparable.
I remember the girl from Human Street very well. Like all depressives, June laughed and told funny stories. Yet this was never the truth, indeed it was all to mask the truth. Roger told his friends – though not in the searing, passionate detail he gives here – that things were awry long before the awful but oddly cathartic day at Golders Green crematorium when he read a homily to his mother, quoted in the book. June died in 1999 of cancer, a disease she held in contempt after the infinitely greater scourge of mental illness. Following two unsuccessful attempts to take her own life, she had described cancer as “a legitimate way out”.
Roger connects his mother’s condition to four generations of displacement – what he calls “a Jewish odyssey of the 20th century, and the tremendous pressure of wandering, adapting, pretending, silencing and forgetting”. The story of the Jews post-Shoah has, as Christopher Hitchens used to say over dinner though not in print, “had a lot of ink”. But rightly so: all six million stories should be told, plus those of their survivors. Joseph Keller wrote: “If you ever forget you’re a Jew, one day a gentile will remind you” and Cohen has a similar sentiment: “Jewishness is chosen for you – history demonstrates that.”
By tracing where his mother came from, Cohen, the Jewish runaway, 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.
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