A Jewish immigrant's struggle to assimilate

Roger Cohen is a columnist for the New York Times and the newspaper's former foreign editor.

After decades of telling other people's stories, the British-born journalist has now told his own in a memoir called The Girl From Human Street.

It is the story of a Jewish family who fled the pogroms in Lithuania, settled in South Africa and whose members then dispersed to England, Israel and, in the case of the author, to the United States.

But most of all Cohen's story is about his relationship with his mother June who, in the face of upheaval and displacement, succumbed to mental illness.

Filmed and Edited by Michael Maher