Ana Pauker and the Jewish Communists. . - Reviews - Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist - book review

Judaism, Fall, 2001 by Peter Kenez

Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist. By ROBERT LEVY. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001.

A few months after the liberation of her country, Ana Pauker, the best known, and perhaps the most powerful Rumanian communist at the time, was summoned to Moscow. She took her young daughter, Tania, and her good friend, Ana Toma, with her. As she entered the Central Committee building, she asked Toma to take care of her daughter if she did not emerge from that building within a certain amount of time. As this episode, described in Robert Levy's new book, shows, the life of a prominent communist was precarious (78). No one knew this better than Pauker, whose beloved husband, Marcel, a convinced communist, had become a victim of the Stalinist purges in 1938. She herself survived the terror because fortunately for her, unlike her husband she was not in Moscow at the time, but in the safety of a Rumanian prison.

Such an episode makes one wonder what kind of human beings the communist potentates like Pauker were, Of course, she was not alone in her predicament. In the post war years, the Jewish Maxim Litvinov, ex-foreign minister of the Soviet Union, went to bed every night with a pistol under his pillow, ready to shoot himself if the political police came for him. Mikhail Kalinin, the President of the Soviet Union, had a Jewish wife in the gulag. So did the foreign minister, Viacheslav Molotov. Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, herself a prominent party member and incidentally, a close friend of Ana Pauker, had been arrested in 1949, to reemerge from the camps after Stalin's death with her communist faith undiminished. How could these people continue to serve a cause that demanded so many obviously innocent victims? How could Jews continue to serve a regime whose policies had become increasingly openly antisemitic?

It is very difficult to understand the mental world of the prominent communists of this period, for they were not in the habit of analyzing themselves, or confiding their thoughts and fears to others. Thinking too much, to say nothing about talking too much, was dangerous. Robert Levy managed to interview some of the surviving relatives and friends of Pauker and therefore the reader of his book is able to get at least some idea about the life and character of Levy's heroine. But ultimately she remains a shadowy figure. We do not learn much about her thoughts, her feelings and her conscience. This is not Levy's fault; he wrote a valuable book, in which he places Pauker in historical context and in the process has much to say about Rumanian Jewry in this period.

AnaPauker, nee Rabinsohn, was born into a poor Jewish Orthodox family. Her grandfather was a rabbi, and remarkably for a girl in that period, Ana learned Hebrew so well that she was able to tutor others. Obviously, she must have been an exceptionally bright girl. Her younger brother, Zalman, became a Zionist, and much later her father emigrated to Israel. Ana, however, at an early age became a socialist and later a communist. Although, of course, she did not consider herself religious, nevertheless Jewish issues remained closer to her than to other Jewish communist leaders. Unlike others who went to great length to hide their Jewishness, Pauker was less able and perhaps less willing to repudiate her background. One cannot imagine, for example, a book on the Hungarian leader, Matyas Rakosi, with a subtitle "The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist" unless it had been written by an anti-Communist antisemite. The Rakosis of this world did everything within their power to hide their inconvenient Jewish connections .

Levy can tell us almost nothing about Pauker as a young woman or even about her rise in the underground communist movement. We learn little about her emotional life or about her short years of marriage to the handsome and charismatic Marcel Pauker. It does not become clear why she among all the Rumanian communists came to be most trusted by the Russians. On the other hand, Levy wrote valuable chapters on Rumanian Jewry in the early decades of the twentieth century, and on the issue of Jewish emigration after World War II.

He paints a gloomy picture of the conditions in which Jews lived. Xenophobic Rumanians prevented their as-similation. Jews were not only considered aliens, but remained legally stateless and only about 1000 out of a population of approximately a quarter of a million received citizenship before World War I (19). At a time when other European countries were emancipating their Jews, Rumania imposed ever more serious restrictions on them. More and more professions came to be closed to them in order to prevent them from competing with Rumanians for middle class occupations and status. Jews were periodically expelled from villages and towns, and on occasion became victims of pogroms. No country in the world was more antisemitic at this time than Rumania. The Rumanian Jewry was incomparably poorer than, for example, the Jews of neighboring Hungary.