73rd Issue: Hans Rey, Ruth First, and Mochizuki Chiyome
You may have noticed that this is no longer a newsletter on Tinyletter. Mailchimp bought it and they wanted me to pay. So I moved to Buttondown, which seems pretty similar. It’s free until I get a lot of subscribers, but I don’t think that will happen for a while. Today I’m writing about three different people I thought were interesting.
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Hans Augusto Rey (Reyersbach), with his wife Margret, created the Curious George books. They were German Jews who were childhood sweethearts, but both fled to Brazil to get away from the Nazis in Germany. They got married in 1935 and moved to Paris, where Hans was commissioned to write a children’s book. But they had to leave Paris in 1940, packing their Curious George manuscript and cycling away to safety a few hours before it fell. They made it to Bayonne in France where the Portuguese Vice-Counsul under instructions by Aristides de Sousa Mendes wrote them visas that had them cross the Spanish border and take a train to Lisbon. They went to Brazil and then on to New York.
The first Curious George book was published in new York in 1941. It was an instant success and they wrote seven books together. In 1977, Hans passed away, and in the 1990s some of the couples’ friend started a bookstore called Curious George & Friends in Massachusetts.
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Heloise Ruth First’s parents were Latvian Jews who moved to South Africa in 1906. They were founding members of the South African Communist Party. Ruth was born in 1925 and grew up in Johannesburg. She joined the communist party as soon as she was old enough. It was allied with the African National Congress to try to overthrow the apartheid government.
Ruth received her bachelor’s degree in 1946, the first person in her family to do so. She helped to found the Progressive Students League at the University of the Witwatersrand and made friends with Nelson Mandela. Ruth worked for the Social Welfare Division of the Johannesburg City Council and she also became editor-in-chief of a radical newspaper which was banned by the state. She exposed apartheid policies in 1948 and wrote about them in the paper.
In 1949 she married Joe Slovo, another South African anti-apartheid activist and Communist. They worked together to lead and organize protests, and had three daughters as well. She and her husband also joined the African National Congress, and in the late 1950s she and her husband were harassed by the state and then put on trial, but acquitted of treason charges. After 1960, a state of emergency was declared and Ruth was no longer allowed to attend meetings or publish. In 1963 she was imprisoned and held in isolation for over a hundred days, the first white woman to be detained this way in South Africa. When she was released, Ruth went into exile in London and lectured at several local universitieis. In 1978, she took a job at the Centre of African Studies in Mozambique, but was assassinated in 1982 on order of a major in the South African Police, by opening a mail bomb.
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Mochizuki Chiyome was a fifteenth century Japanese woman, the wife of Mochizuki Moritoki, a samurai lord. When her husband was killed, she was left in the care of the leader of the Takeda clan, her husband’s uncle. He asked her to create an underground network of female ninjas to use against rival clans.
Mochizuki came from a long line of ninja, and began searching for potential candidates who could act as spies. She recruited sex workers, victims of the civil war, and young orphans. They trained to become spies, seductresses, messengers, and assassins. They used disguises and moved freely as actresses, sex workers, or geisha. At one point she had nearly three hundred agents, and the clan was always one step ahead of their opponents because of their inside information. In 1573, the Takeda clan leader died mysteriously, and we do not know what became of Mochizuki after that.
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No pictures this time around, because I'm still learning how this new platform works, but next time I will! Thanks for reading and sticking with me :)