Devorah's Prayer

In the 1970s as a result of the intellectual labours of senior academics working under the auspices of what become known as ‘The History Workshop in South Africa’ a resurgence of radical political activism erupted among students on the historically white university campuses. Apart from the critical revision of South African history which was informed by applying Marxist class analysis to the explaining and understanding of the origins and development of the Apartheid, undergraduate students became increasing exposed in lectures to Marxist thinkers such as Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Althusser. Works by Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas and Poulantzas became standard reading among the new radicals of the 1970s. However the intellectual drift among students was not towards the 1960s Neo-Marxism of the Europe and North America, it was rather something much more radical, more African in a manner of speaking, it took the form of a rediscovery of Communism. An influential hard-core minority of white students became Communists without necessarily joining the banned underground South African Communist Party.
As a consequence of the new academic trends within South African universities a sizable minority of white students broke ranks with the traditional liberal positions of so-called white progressive politics and openly embraced radical non-racialism within the totalizing system of Marxist-Leninism.
Franco and Devorah were two such people. Franco Sorrentino the grandson of an Italian prisoner of war and the son of a panel beater and Devorah Kirschenbaum the granddaughter of Jewish Trotskyite grandparents who fled Warsaw in 1939 and daughter of a prominent Johannesburg businessman become involved in a relationship. Together they become drawn ineluctably into radical political activism causing them to face choices fraught with moral dilemmas. In the end they become Anarcho