Robert Levy,Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xii + 407 pp. $35 cloth.

Extract

Ana Pauker was a Romanian Jewish communist who, by the early 1930s, became a well-known figure of the international movement and, after World War Two, one of the leading political personalities in her country. Nevertheless, in 1952, she was purged together with two other members of the Politburo as a result of backstage maneuvers orchestrated by the fourth member of that political organ. Jailed for a short period, she was released after Stalin's death and lived the rest of her life completely marginalized, forgotten by her former comrades who never once ceased to praise her. However, Pauker never rejected her communist allegiance nor did she engage in writing her memoirs.