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

Frankel, Glenn

4.23

52 ratings by Goodreads

9780374250997: Rivonia's Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374250995 ISBN 13: 9780374250997

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999

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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)

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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.

From Kirkus Reviews:

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.

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