Like Father, like son: Frankels have write stuff:

Poet and author are among featured guests at libraries in Brookline and Boston

By Susie Davidson

Special to the Advocate

It was a busy few days for the Frankel family. During a Jan. 17 private launch at the Boston Public Library (BPL) for his son, Neville‘s new book “Bloodlines,” Freddy Frankel read poems about growing up white in apartheid South Africa,.

The main characters of Frankel the younger’s new novel, a historical thriller reflecting the cold legacy of Apartheid South Africa, are a Jewish woman, Michaela Davidson Green, and 　a Zulu man, Lenny Green, who meet through political involvements, and fall in love. Prior to "Bloodlines," he wrote a political thriller, “The Third Power,” about the transformation of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe.　His work on a BBC documentary, “The Hillside Strangler:　Mind of a Murderer” won him an Emmy.

“’Bloodlines’ is not my first foray into writing,” he told the Advocate. “I have always written stories, and was writing long before I knew that my father had been a poet from the trenches during World War II.” He says that observing his father’s post-retirement writing career has been a source of further, continuing inspiration.

The BPL program, to be emceed and moderated by the Rev. Liz Walker (who is currently working in war-ravaged Sudan), will feature remarks from Assumption College Professor and South African native Michael Langa, who worked alongside Bishop Desmond Tutu during the 1996 Truth and Reconciliation Hearings. Encompassing five decades, the new book delves into the natural beauty of the country, as well as Zulu culture; correspondingly, the event will also showcase music, artifacts, photography, and foods of South Africa. Neville D. Frankel will read excerpts from the novel, and participate in a Q&A session.

A financial planner who was named among Boston Magazine’s 2010 list of Top Scoring Wealth Managers in the Boston Area, Frankel has three grown children with his wife Marlene, and also enjoys painting. Born in Johannesburg, his family immigrated to Boston when he was 14, following the ominous, 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he studied English literature in a doctoral program at the University of Toronto. “When we arrived in Boston, I was focused on becoming an American,” he said. “It was not until I reached my forties that I became curious about the country of my birth.” The first of several return trips to South Africa began in 2002.

These travels back accorded him the opportunity to research book ideas, but also provided a learning experience about those affected by the shadow of the former all-white, racist-based government. “I knew when we left in 1962 that black South Africans lived under the crippling restrictions of apartheid, but I discovered that they were not completely alone in their struggle against the immorality and appalling consequences of that policy,” he said. “I realized that there were white, middle class South Africans, many of them Jews, whose parents came from Eastern Europe and had socialist or communist ties, who were risking their lives in demonstrations, underground activities, and political organizing in support of the anti-apartheid movement.” He began to wonder what life might have been like if his own family had taken part in this opposition movement. It was this discovering of his own history, and this unknown speculation that led to his newest book.

Frankel and his wife have continued their explorations of his native homeland. “We have visited remote and extraordinarily beautiful areas and have met and been touched by some remarkable people,” he said. As for sharing a spot with his father, he is all aglow. “The fact I can host an event that is both a celebration of South Africa and a forum in which we will both be reading from our work, is a richness that I could never have imagined or wished for,” he said.

This Sunday, dad Freddy Frankel, who lives at the Lasell College campus senior community with his wife Betty, plans to read a few poems from his first book, 2003’s “Hottentot　Venus: Poems of Apartheid” (Pudding House　Publications), which will include the South African section he will read from at his son’s book launch. He will read as well as from 2006’s “In a Stone’s Hollow” (Fairweather Books, an imprint of Bedbug Press) and his most recent book, 2011’s “Wrestling Angels” (Ibbetson Street Press), which has been excerpted in the Jewish Daily Forward. In this collection's metered verses, Frankel interprets subject matter ranging from the Old Testament, Christian figures, the Dreyfus trial and its coverage by then-journalist Theodor Herzl, to the Holocaust, and ultimately, to G-d.　

“The Jewish migration to America was about one generation ahead of the migration to South Africa,” he explained. (According to the Jewish Museum in New York,　despite discriminatory　laws passed in 1930 and in 1937,　there were approximately 100,000 Jews in South Africa in 1946 [representing 4.4 percent of the white population], with a high of 120,000 in the early 1970s. Due to declines both before and following apartheid, the number is about 76,000 today.)

Frankel says most, like his forebears, were from Lithuania, Russia, and Germany.　His uncle Fritz had died in a flu epidemic in Germany. “My father could hardly name a son born in 1924 South Africa Fritz, as we were part of the British Empire,” he said, noting that South Africa had been at war with Germany during World War I.　His father and grandfather were Orthodox, and Frankel had a Hebrew school education and bar mitzvah. He has always enjoyed going to synagogue and his family belongs to Temple Israel in Boston, where all three children were b’nai mitzvot. “But when you return to the Bible as an adult, you find that there’s a lot more there that they didn’t tell you,” he said. “And when I had time to think, I began to question.”

At the Brookline Library, Frankel will also read from new work that will comprise an upcoming book. “This will be about growing older, living at Lasell, and reflecting on a variety of past and current issues,” he said. His prospective title is "You're Old Only Once."

Prior to migrating to the U.S. in 1962, after which he never saw his own father again, Frankel, then known as Fred H. Frankel, earned an advanced degree in psychiatry from the University of the Witwatersrand. On the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 1969, and a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry since 1997, he served as the Director of Acute Psychiatric Service at Mass. General Hospital, and was Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Beth Israel Hospital from 1986 to 1997. Since retiring, he has taken poetry classes at Harvard Extension School, and studied with poet instructors Barbara Helfgott Hyett and Tom Daley. In 2003, he was the recipient of the prestigious New England Writers Robert Penn Warren First Award. His work has appeared in publications including　Cape Codder,　Ibbetson Street,　Jewish Currents,　Moment,　The Oak,　Passenger, Senior Times,　and　The Tusculum Review. It has also been featured in several anthologies.