‘No Country for Idealists. The Making of a Family of Subversives’ by Boris Frankel is a memoir that is tragic, mind boggling, inspiring, heart-rending and engrossing! It straddles the life the times of a period in Australia and the Soviet Union that provided circumstances that infected the Frankel family and brought sadness and not hope, cynicism not idealism.
Boris, who I had the fortune to spend some time with as an Honorary with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne, weaves an extraordinary life story with personal anecdotes dotted through the forensic analysis of ASIO and Federal Government machinations. Names such as Menzies, Downer, Casey, Spry are the adversaries who along with KGB agents bring much pain and suffering to the family.
I was fixated on the national and international events that were played out on an innocent father whose only failing was that he was an idealist and believed in social justice and equity. Neither Australia nor the Soviet Union were up to the challenge! It was a painful realisation for Abraham Frankel that his idealism was not just misplaced but that he had been hoodwinked by the Soviet propaganda and disinformation.
In Australia the authorities meted out punishment based on innuendo and fabrications. It left me in awe of the Frankel family’s resilience and survival in the face of incompetents and malicious people on the left and right who served their own bureaucratic or political ambition rather than humanity. I am reminded of the many families and individuals who suffer systemic injustice and vilification today.
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