Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country

Rating:
Summary: Moving and challenging
Review: A great read that poses the difficult question: what ought to come first--one's children, or one's cause? Especially challenging when the cause is the end of apartheid. Gillian Slovo is bitter that she didn't have her parents because they were busy trying to free South Africa. Understandable from an individual point of view, but the contribution of the Slovos to the anti-apartheid movement was invaluable. I don't know the correct answer to the question, but I do know that this is a good and engaging tale.

Rating:
Summary: How to think like a Commie - from their kid's point of view
Review: Gillian Slovo is unapologetic in her rather petulant story of a neglected childhood. While her parents pursued Communism and pushed against the apartheid government of South Africa, all the while earning a good income with her father's lawyering, she and her sisters suffered especially her ambitious mother's indifference, imprisonment and lack of home life "quality time".

Ruth First, daughter of Polish Jews, ambitious in her own right and extremely intelligent and sharp-tongued, married Joe Slovo, also Jewish, of Russian origin, with struggling parents. It was a climb up for him, with the steady rise of his income as a lawyer in post-WWII South Africa under white rule. His children lived well, enjoyed the blacks as servants, and attended private schools. The parents ran hither and to as Communists tend to do.

What makes this book uncommonly candid from a red is that the daughter, while unequivocally defending her parents' "struggles", openly begrudges their self-absorption and cause-related time-consuming party activities. When her parents become wanted criminals, the father escapes over the border and the mother ultimately goes to prison. Understandably, our writer, the daughter Gillian, is annoyed. She and her siblings avoid mentioning their parents in any of their schools, but her Russian-Jewish name betrays their origins, their parents' political proclivities, and brands the daughters as traitors.

The inside battle of any political movement will always take its toll on the activists' children. This part of the book is almost comical in its self-centeredness, but we all can relate if we have had parents with any reasons for indifference or neglect.

What I enjoyed was reading how her parents had come to such political ideas, why they dove in to the blacks' cause so valiantly, and how they throve on the injustice to others. When push came to shove, the mother takes the daughters to England, since the Communists and others of their ilk have made South Africa a blood bath for whites. To this day, the nonblacks of that country are fleeing in huge numbers, not the least of which are the descendants of the persecuted Jews of Russia and Poland, who classify themselves as "white", yet still oppressed in spite of great economic priviledge.

The effect of Communist ideas on emerging nations has been catastrophic, but rare is the book that tells openly how devious and traitorous its proponents can be. The end result always seems to send them scurrying out of the nation in which they had once prospered, to go to yet another free nation and stir up further unrest.

Rest assured that they would not move into a black neighborhood in England or America, no matter their anti-apartheid views!

Thanks to Gillian Slovo for revealing the inside scoop on these infamous Reds.

Rating:
Summary: A Moving True Story
Review: This book is very well and sensitively written. It gives a very vivid picture of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, two very strong willed people who were dedicated to the anti apartheid struggle in the dark years of apartheid in the last 40 years before the first democratic elections in 1994.

Here we get a true picture of how ths couple had sacrificed their family life for what they had believed in and how this had effected their relationship with their eldest daughter (the author). One cannot help but empathize with the author who makes no bones about the neglect that her parents had towards her relationship with them and how she truly wanted to know more about her parents who were rather secretive towards her.

The book makes very exciting reading. My main criticism is that there is a tendency to jump backwards and forwards in the past. There seems to be a problem of continuity of style as passed anecdotes are retold at different stages in this biography.There is also a tendency to repetition. This tends to marr a rather good book which is recommended to all those who are interested in the history of the freedom struggle in South Africa.

Rating:
Summary: A Moving True Story
Review: This book is very well and sensitively written. It gives a very vivid picture of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, two very strong willed people who were dedicated to the anti apartheid struggle in the dark years of apartheid in the last 40 years before the first democratic elections in 1994.

Here we get a true picture of how ths couple had sacrificed their family life for what they had believed in and how this had effected their relationship with their eldest daughter (the author). One cannot help but empathize with the author who makes no bones about the neglect that her parents had towards her relationship with them and how she truly wanted to know more about her parents who were rather secretive towards her.

The book makes very exciting reading. My main criticism is that there is a tendency to jump backwards and forwards in the past. There seems to be a problem of continuity of style as passed anecdotes are retold at different stages in this biography.There is also a tendency to repetition. This tends to marr a rather good book which is recommended to all those who are interested in the history of the freedom struggle in South Africa.