Communist leader

The only Romanian woman who was on the cover of Time (on September 20, 1948), Ana Pauker, born Hanna Rabinsohn (1893-1960), granddaughter to a rabbi in Moldova, was called "the most powerful woman in the world" by that magazine. In Romania, instead, she was nicknamed "a Stalin in skirts." Today, rarely remembered, she is seen as one more piece in the gear of Soviet communism in Romania. A biography by Robert Levy (Ana Pauker, the rise and fall of a Jewish Communist, University of California Press, 2001) has dramatically transformed this image, revealing a woman of remarkable strength, much more dominated by conflicts and contradictions than by dogmatism. Telling the story of Ana Pauker's youth in an increasingly anti-Semitic environment, her commitment to revolutionary struggle and her rise into the Romanian Communist movement, Robert Levy does not attempt to hide her activities, but explores all the contours of her complex personality based on data found in the mass of documents recently disclosed.