Hilda Bernstein is the century’s child, a product of the 1900s. She has been through the political mill as a communist activist and then being hounded by the apartheid police. Bernstein has experienced the disillusion felt by other political devotees and has outlived, literally, the Soviet system and seen it come to nothing. During the Forties she was elected the first and only Communist Party city councillor in Johannesburg and was an outstanding spokesperson for the party. Her husband Rusty was arrested during the Rivonia episode. On his release on bail they both escaped to Britain, where they have lived ever since. Rusty died recently.Bernstein was born and brought up in England with her two sisters. Her father, Simeon, was an immigrant from the Ukraine, but never abandoned his fiery fervour as a revolutionary. He neither sought nor acquired British citizenship, although he did anglicise the family surname from Schwartz to Watts, a tribute perhaps to a new and promising environment.After the Russian Revolution he returned to Russia to work for the Soviets. Bernstein never saw him again. Although he desperately wanted to return to his family in England, he was a Soviet citizen and the oppressive bureacracy prevented it. We can feel for him even as we marvel at his blind devotion.Bernstein’s father wrote copious letters, which are reproduced in this book, and it is plain — and heartbreaking — to discern the slow and painful disillusion that inevitably engulfed him. He did not live to see Stalin’s infamous purges of his former comrades — men such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin — but so disenchanted was he with the Soviet dictator that they would hardly have surprised him. Simeon’s desperate frustration in not being able to rejoin his family was plainly unbearable. When it became apparent that they would never be reunited, Bernstein and her mother came to live in South Africa. But her sister Olga — the “good-looking one in the family” — left for the Soviet Union, determined to meet up with her father. This she did and the meeting was a happy one. Olga decided to stay in Moscow for a while and became a schoolteacher of English. But when she tried to return to Britain World War II broke out and she too was trapped in Russia. She succeeded in making a new life for herself and established some close friends, including a man called Henry.Olga was an exceptionally talented letter writer and in this book much of her correspondence is reproduced, painting a fascinating picture of pre-war Russia and later, when so much of it was devastated by the Germans. Life was not easy for the Russians, to say the very least, and Olga suffered with the rest. She emerges as a courageous and warm person who never gave way to despair, although the temptation to do so must have been very strong. Her letters, descriptive and eminently readable, mark her as someone who cared deeply for other people, lacking neither determination nor passion. Some of her descriptive passages are outstanding. But Bernstein’s book is much more than a mere family story. It is almost a pocket version of the history of the Soviet Union and of the terrible war that engulfed it. Her description of the Moscow Metro underground, built under the express orders of Stalin, is particularly good. The author has done her homework and, for her readers, young and not-so-young, it is good — splendid really — to be reminded of what took place there a mere 60 years ago. Of course, many families were engulfed by those terrible years but, regrettably, their stories will perish with them. Thankfully, the Watts family archives will survive.A Life of One’s Own is a family narrative that we are glad Bernstein shares with us. And it makes a significant contribution, on a personal and intimate level, to what we know of the land once called the Soviet Union.