Yet she also found love in the streets of Paris. In search for better prospects she moved to France where she became heavily involved in the Communist movement of the early 20”s. Her interest, however, was not purely a practical one as she like most secular Jews in Eastern Europe were well versed in Marxist dialectics. In 1915 she joined the Social Democratic Party in Romania, and later Bolshevik- styled organization modeled after the 1917 Revolutionary bodies in Russia. In her young days she was not particularly interested in Socialism, nor Zionism for that matter, not until her own brother Zalman Robinsohn took interest in both at least. In fact, she knew it so well that she thought Hebrew at a Jewish School in Bucharest. However, one thing is sure, from a young age she learned Hebrew and became highly competent in it. With her grandfather, a rabbi, and her father the haham/shohet of the village it is obvious how she probably received a fairly standard Jewish education for a girl. This only serves to show how evil and good, although social fabrications, can exist alongside each other.īorn in Cadesti, Romania in a Jewish Orthodox family, Hannah Robinsohn, as she went by in those days, grew up in a traditional Ashkenazi household. In fact her precarious personality, although unpredictable and duplicitous, was by no means mutually exclusive. It argues that despite the negative rhetoric against Pauker, she was a woman that was both vicious but also ironically humane in some situations. Levy’s famous biography of Pauker is an elusive explanation of one of the most complex women to have ever graced modern politics. In other words, although she was a harsh Stalinist, she did do some good, and was by no means solely the monster that she was painted by the Western media. However, her rise to power did not miss the rhetoric and the violence of a socialist transition, nor was her rule particularly dominated by either overwhelming evil or good. In fact, she was very much in the grey zone, in her attempt to stabilize the transition from an autocratic fascist government to a socialist one.
The first woman in history to hold the highest position in a state, as foreign minister and unofficial party leader, her face was triumphantly pasted on a 1948 issue of Time magazine, which called her not only a rigid woman, but a Stalinist. Romania’s Iron Lady has made very little headway in the history books despite her significant role as the unofficial head of the Romanian Communist party, and effectively the nation, between 19.
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