(See Cover)
It was Saturday. In Israel, the beaches were crowded, food was being cooked, and a modern government transacted business as usual, but in the house of Zvi Rabin-sohn, the Lord's day was being kept. In a sparsely furnished living room at Mikve Israel (an agricultural school near Tel Aviv), Zvi's son Solomon was reading aloud from the Bible; Zvi himself, a fragile old man with a flowing white beard, lay on a couch listening. Just then, a U.S. newsman came in to ask some questions about another member of the family.
Solomon reluctantly closed the Bible. "I cannot speak about my sister or our childhood days," he said. His quiet teacher's voice—he is a teacher of classical Hebrew at the school—showed neither affection nor dislike. "She is a very important person and I am a very simple man. I do not like to advertise us."
Solomon's wife thought that, in justice, her scholarly husband should be considered at least as important as his sister, back home in Rumania. "We could tell a lot if we wanted to," she said. Her husband silenced her. But old Zvi's brown eyes flashed at the mention of his daughter. He sat up eagerly, his stocking feet dangling above the floor. "She was a very intelligent girl," he said. "I brought her up in the strictest Orthodox way."
The woman of whom they did not quite dare speak was, in fact, the most powerful woman alive, and millions of people as simple as the Rabinsohns depended on her for life, bread and spiritual guidance. She had moved a long way from the grimy Bucharest street where her father had first taught her the stern Old Testament notions of good & evil; she had abandoned the jealous God of her fathers for another faith. She was Ana Rabinsohn Pauker, a Communist, and a key figure in the struggle for the world.
The Woman Who Talks to Stalin. Now she is fat and ugly; but once she was slim and (her friends remember) beautiful. Once she was warmhearted, shy and full of pity for the oppressed, of whom she was one. Now she is cold as the frozen Danube, bold as a boyar on his own rich land and pitiless as a scythe in the Moldavian grain.
She spent nearly all her life in mean dwellings and six years of it in Rumanian jails. Now she lives in three great houses, moving almost every night because she fears assassins. (Scores of other Rumanians shift their sleeping quarters from night to night because they fear Ana's secret police.) One of her houses belonged to Prince Brancoveanu. One belonged to Nicolae Malaxa, big industrialist and speculator. And one belonged to red-haired Magda Lupescu, ex-King Carol's mistress and now his wife.
Ana has replaced them all. The power of the aristocrats, the industrialists, the royal playboys and the royal concubines has passed into her hands. She runs Rumania. Her title is Foreign Minister, but her job is that of Stalin's proconsul. Of the seven telephones on her office desk one is said to be a direct line to the Kremlin. Asked if she had permission to call Stalin at any hour, Ana answered: "When the occasion arises, I can reach him."