Review of "Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country" by Gillian Slovo

A well-written personal memoir of the Apartheid years and the end of white South Africa by one who was intimately connected with the struggle, this swing back and forward between the big-p political and the entirely personal.

Gillian Slovo is (or at least was, when she wrote the book) still angry with her parents for not loving her as much as they loved the struggle; something she acknowledges herself finding in the children of other figures from the movement, including Mandela's daughter. So there's sometimes a petulant, aggrieved tone to the book, and it doesn't make me want to know the author.

But there's lots to absorb, about what people in the opposition to Apartheid went through, especially those white people in leadership roles - and about the way it played out in their personal lives. 

And I'm aware, too, that it's a little bit of insight into the world in which Ruth grew up, even though her parents were not actively engaged in any kind of anti-Apartheid politics while in South Africa - though they did have personal relationships with many of the people that were. 

Every so often Slovo seems to remember that her parents were both Jewish, but it doesn't feature in a major way - maybe it didn't for them either. Some of the considerations of this seem implausible - could her grandmother really have forgotten her childhood Yiddish so thoroughly that she was no longer able to speak to her own mother?