The girl in Roger Cohen's The Girl from Human Street (Vintage, £9.99) is his charming, intelligent mother June, a South African Jew who emigrated to England as a young wife and never quite came to terms with her adoptive homeland.

Hers was a life plagued by mental illness, including a period when she was hospitalised and given electro-shock therapy and the story, from her suicide notes to the powerlessness of Cohen's father to improve the situation, is heartbreaking.

But Cohen, former foreign editor of the New York Times, tells much more than his mother's story. His ambitious memoir attempts to make sense of his lineage - and of June's tumultuous personality - starting with the grandparents and great-grandparents who emigrated from Lithuania.

Cohen looks at how these ancestors shed their religious roots and rebuilt their lives in South Africa, some doing exceptionally well in the process, not least retail entrepreneur Isaac Michel, who, Cohen says, co-founded the OK Bazaars chain.

He describes in vivid detail what life was like for a well-to-do Jewish family on the African continent in the pre- and post-war years, from the beach holidays at Muizenberg to the very English schools to which they sent their children. Next, for his parents, was a move to an England where antisemitism was prevalent but subdued; for his cousins, a move to Jerusalem.

For once, Jews were on the right side of things: they were white

It's not an easy book. Cohen meanders from past to present to even more distant past, and traces the lives of dozens of relatives (as well as some who are not family at all, but merely from the same peripatetic background), thus it is sometimes testing to work out which side of the family we're reading about. Luckily there is a family tree at the beginning of the book.

Some of what he covers is troubling; he dismisses the claim that many in the community actively opposed apartheid, and explores in depth the idea that South African Jews thrived precisely because of the existence of an oppressed black under-class. "In gold-rush Johannesburg," he writes, "Jews were for once on the right side of things: they were white."

And, as someone who has reported on the Middle East, towards the book's close he ruminates on whether Jews have truly learnt the lessons of the past and the way Israel has placed itself "in a morally indefensible noose".

Still, this is the kind of book we'd all wish for to preserve our own family histories. In taking an incisive look at the past century in Jewish life - from the frontier spirit of Jews in a welcoming diaspora, to the dignity of so many in the face of the abject evil of the Nazi regime, Cohen reminds the reader that there is no one Jewish story.