Towards the end of his book Glenn Frankel paints a picture of the scene at a hearing of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. On one side of the table are Roger Jerry Raven, Craig Williamson and Johann Coetzee, the men responsible for sending parcel bombs on behalf of the apartheid regime to those who opposed it.
On the other side were seated Shawn, Gillian and Robyn Slovo, whose mother Ruth First had been murdered by the state. Beside them was Marius Schoon, whose wife Jeannette and little daughter Katryn were blown to pieces by a similar bomb sent through the post. (I should declare an interest here, for Marius was a dear friend in Dublin and in Johannesburg; he died of cancer earlier this year.)
Rivonia's Children gives us a history of South Africa - largely from a white, antiapartheid perspective - from the arrest of leading Communist Party and ANC members at Lilliesleaf Farm in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia until the arrival of democracy in 1994, with an epilogue which brings us almost to the present.
The Rivonia raid, with its subsequent and celebrated trial, marked a focal point in South Africa's history. It was here that the old-fashioned racism of the apartheid regime began its journey towards systematic oppression and the setting up of one of the most brutal police states in history. It was here, too, that resistance to the regime moved from the intellectual to the physical sphere.
Frankel portrays South Africa's slide towards totalitarianism through the eyes of white, mainly Jewish, members of the South African Communist Party and their families. The fact that many of the Communists were Jews was, not surprisingly, played up by the racists who ran the country. But Frankel rightly points out that most South African Jews shied away from politics of all kinds. There were also some who supported the regime, notably Mr Percy Yutar, who prosecuted the Rivonia trialists.
The lives of Rusty Bernstein, his wife Hilda and their family, of Ruth First, Joe Slovo and their children, and of the family of Harold and Ann Marie Wolpe are portrayed against the backdrop of the struggle against apartheid, giving the reader a view of history from the very homes of these families.
While Frankel shows a perceptive insight into one section of the Jewish community's reaction against apartheid and the understandable caution of another, larger, group, perhaps the most sensitive segment of the book deals with a gentile who was the most unlikely Communist of all.
Bram Fischer was a member of the Afrikaner elite destined, provided he accepted apartheid, to become Prime Minister or perhaps Chief Justice. Instead his life drew to a close in a prison cell in which his cancer was left untreated. Unlike some of the others - particularly Ruth First and Hilda Bernstein, who rebelled against orthodox Communist ideology - Fischer could not bring himself to reject the diktats of the Kremlin.
His life, according to the liberal politician Helen Suzman, was "a tragic waste", while his fellow Afrikaner Andre Brink believed it served to enlarge and deepen the concept of Afrikanerdom. Rivonia's Children leaves it to the reader to decide.
Seamus Martin is an Irish Times journalist and a former South Africa correspondent of this newspaper.
