"Trees have roots. Jews have legs. So it was with my family, always on the move," writes Roger Cohen in his new memoir, The Girl From Human Street. Cohen is a celebrated New York Times correspondent. He is so very good because, unlike many of his colleagues, he never sits still. He is an inveterate traveller, an insatiable reporter.Cohen was raised in London by absent parents: an illustrious doctor preoccupied with work ("love was a prize to be earned rather than a sure harbour"), and a mother who was "emptied out" by recurrent bouts of mental illness and electro-shock therapy. She is "the girl from Human Street" in Krugersdorp - although her emotional home is Houghton, where her illustrious grandfather, a founder of OK Bazaars, held court amid the sunlit greenery and the liveried servants; where life was a "picnic in a beautiful cemetery where people were buried alive", Cohen writes, borrowing from Nadine Gordimer to describe the condition of being white in apartheid South Africa.Cohen's mother, June, fell ill when the family moved to London in 1957 so that her husband could pursue his career away from the problems of apartheid.The author believes the migration triggered his mother's illness: she was a "transplant that never took root", a bright flower withered by chilly England, and she attempted suicide shortly after their arrival.His book resonates strongly with Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness, in which the Israeli novelist recounts the story of his European family's flight to Palestine in the years before World War 2 and his mother's suicide, triggered by the displacement.Oz's memoir is unforgettable. Cohen's endeavour to merge his family's trauma with the larger story of Jewish migration is less sure. But his book is compelling nonetheless, not just because of his fluency and erudition but because both quests - trying to make sense of his Jewish heritage and trying to make sense of his childhood - are an attempt by their restless author to make "a single chain" of history and lived experience.What these two quests have in common is the rupture of silence. Cohen's parents rejected their Jewish heritage and he only found out about his mother's suicide attempt and consequent electro-shock therapy when he was a young man. Both lacunae were, at root, the consequences of shame and a past "as silent as a village at the bottom of a dam".At the heart of this book remains a poignant obscurity. Cohen has spent a productive life telling the stories of others and he does so assuredly in this book too, as in the tale of his Israeli cousin, Rena, and her suicide."From an early age," he writes, "I had grown used to deploying my imagination as a defence. I told many other stories from many other datelines before I realised, returning to the place where I began, that the one story I had to tell was [my mother's]."And he does. But despite his acuity, particularly when describing June Cohen ("She was bright - and when she was not, she hid away"), he cannot grasp the emptiness that was in place of maternal love. The Girl From Human Street remains hidden from her son, and from us, as she must.The Girl From Human Street, Bloomsbury, published by Jonathan Ball, R350..