Rivonia's Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa - Hardcover

Frankel, Glenn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374250995 ISBN 13: 9780374250997

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

Frankel, a staff writer and editor for The Washington Post , tells the story of a handful of white activists, many of them Jewish, who risked their lives to combat apartheid in South Africa during the 1960s. Their underground headquarters was in Rivonia, a Johannesburg suburb, and it was there that their dream of revolution was shattered after a police raid in 1963. Nelson Mandela and nine others were tried for sabotage, leading to the birth of another generation of activists and the miracle of racial reconciliation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author

Glenn Frankel has been a staff writer and editor for The Washington Post for twenty years. He is the paper's former bureau chief in South Africa, London, and Jerusalem, where he won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of the Middle East. He is the author of Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel, winner of the 1995 National Jewish Book Award. Frankel is currently the editor of The Washington Post Magazine and lives with his family in Arlington, Virginia.

Reviews

A former South Africa bureau chief of the Washington Post, Frankel writes with depth and style about a group of mostly Jewish, mostly Communist, activists who, in the early 1960s, allied themselves with black activists seeking an end to apartheid. Rivonia was the farm outside Johannesburg where these radicals and their comrades were captured in a 1963 raid. The most compelling figures are Rusty and Hilda Bernstein; Rusty penned the African National Congress's inspirational Freedom Charter. Others in the book include Ruth First, journalist and wife of ANC and Communist Party leader Joe Slovo (the film A World Apart was based on her life), and Bram Fischer, a lawyer and Afrikaner rebel whose life inspired Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter. Frankel's kaleidoscopic style sometimes slows things down, and he could have done more to explore the group's reflections on the new South Africa they helped build. But Frankel constructs a dramatic narrative, combining interviews with his subjects (also some police and a Jewish prosecutor) with existing memoirs, histories and other accounts. The story is propelled by his own cogent assessments, by his deep respect for these activists and by his ruminations on the extraordinarily charged moral choices these people made and what their decisions cost them (in any number of ways, including family relationships, imprisonment and exile). Hilda Bernstein's observation rings powerfully: "The meaning of life is not a fact to be discovered, but a choice you make about the way you live."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The author of an erudite look at politics in Israel (Beyond the Promised Land, 1994) uses the stories of three Jewish families to dramatize the history of the struggle for racial equality in South Africa. Frankel chronicles the watershed event of the police raid in Rivonia, a white suburb of Johannesburg, in 1963 to tell the history of the antiapartheid struggle forward and backward. Afterward, Rusty Bernstein and Nelson Mandela and myriad others were tried for treason, and imprisoned, and the struggle went underground. The regime became fascist and brutal. And yet there had been a time, shortly after WWII, when Communists such as Hilda and Rusty Bernstein and liberals such as Alan Paton could join in their hopes for the kind of peaceful racial solutions that eventually won over in the US. Before Rivonia, the Bernsteins, Ruth and Joe First, Harold and AnnMarie Wolpe, and dozens of other white Jewish radicals lived prosperous middle-class lives similar to white American suburbanites of the time. Frankel tells the story of their fight against apartheid, but he also tells of what happened to these familiesbroken, in many ways, by the struggle. The Bernstein children, whom their parents shielded from their radicalism, were nevertheless traumatized by their parents eventual imprisonment. Ruth First, the movement's seemingly indomitable voice for women, was eventually killed by a bomb from the secret police. And in what may be the most archetypal story of them all, AnnMarie Wolpe, a virtual bystander though her husband was a leading activist, was caught up in the terrible repression, as she tried to hold her family together. Portraits of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and dozens of others emerge, but Frankel's true interests lie with these family casualties. A superb recounting of one of the less well-known parts of the battle against apartheid. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Rivonia trial in South Africa in 1963 sentenced Nelson Mandela and other antiapartheid leaders to jail for life and shattered the underground resistance movement. Frankel's focus is on the white activists in the movement, nearly all of them Jewish, who gave up their privileged lives and suffered in jail, in hiding, and in exile. Drawing on published memoirs as well as dozens of personal interviews, Frankel (a Pulitzer Prize winner and one-time bureau chief in South Africa for the Washington Post) tells a gripping story of political action and private grief. He honors their idealism and courage even as he recounts the tactical mistakes they made and the terrible cost to their families. Those interested in antiapartheid history will want to read this intimate, fair account of the leaders, such as Ruth First (who was later killed by a letter bomb). Many readers will also be fascinated by the parallels Frankel draws with the U.S. at the time, the relations between Jews and blacks in a black-led movement for social justice. Hazel Rochman

This is a well-researched and nicely written account of the small circle of left-wing radicals who immersed themselves in the South African anti-apartheid movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Frankel, a former South Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post, was also the winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He writes with insight and assurance about the events that propelled talented individuals such as Ruth First, Joseph Slovo, Hilda and Rusty Bernstein, Harold and AnnMarie Wolpe, and Nelson Mandela to organize an underground campaign of sabotage against the apartheid regime. In 1963, the South African police raided their secret Communist Party headquarters in the town of Rivonia, which marked a key turning point in the development of anti-apartheid politics. Of this generation of activists, Frankel says "They had taken a risk that others...would not take, had eschewed comfort and thrown away security when others chose to go along and reap the benefits of silence and moral compliance." This is a useful addition to the literature on postwar South Africa and is recommended for larger public and academic libraries.AKent Worcester, Marymount Manhattan Coll., New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374250995
• ISBN 13: 9780374250997
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 381