Rivonia's Children; Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa
Betsyellen Yeager (Author photograph) New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. [10], 381, [1] pages Endpaper maps. Author's Note. Illustrations. Note on Sources. Chapter Notes. Index. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page. The inscription reads To Bob Wellen -- With very best wishes. Glenn Frankel. In this revealing portrait of life under apartheid, Glenn Frankel tells of three Jewish families who took stands against apartheid, and their difficult lives after the 1963 raid in Rivonia, a white suburb of Johannesburg. "....is the harrowing and inspiring account of a handful of white activists, many of them Jewish, who risked their lives to combat apartheid when, in the 1960s, South Africa plunged into an era of darkness.....Their underground headquarters were in Rivonia, a Johannesburg suburb, and it was there that their dream of revolution was shattered after a police raid in 1963. Nelson Mandela, Rusty Bernstein and eight of their comrades were tried for sabotage and attempting to violently overthrow the government...Is also the moving story of the impact of political activism on the lives of three families....". Glenn Frankel is an American author and academic, journalist and winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He spent 27 years with The Washington Post, where he was bureau chief in Richmond (Va.), Southern Africa, Jerusalem and London, and editor of The Washington Post Magazine. He served as Director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Author of five books, his latest works explore the making of an iconic American movie in the context of its historical era. In 2018 Frankel was named a Motion Picture Academy Film Scholar. 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. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: 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." Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Apartheid, Racism, South Africa, Nelson Mandela, Jews, Racial Reconciliation, African National Congress, Bram Fischer, Joe Slovo, Rusty Bernstein, Hilda Bernstein. Nadine Gordimer, Afrikaner
ISBN: 0374250995
[Book #86466]
Price: $125.00