When, at 13, my rebellious move toward the left coincided with the emerging cold war, a teasing Bronx cousin took to calling me "Ana Pauker." Some boys in my school in the heart of Flatbush also picked up on the "Ana Pauker" routine. Pauker, a Jewish woman who'd become the chief party theoretician in Communist Romania and the sole female leader in the Soviet bloc, was in the news quite a bit in the late 1940s. On the cover of Time, in a spread in Life, the image of Romania's Iron Lady was stout and unsmiling, a monolith with a face of stone, dowdy clothes and unkempt hair. The Pauker taunt wasn't a caveat about Stalinism. It was a nasty dig about a girl's looks when she starts to spout unpopular opinions.

By the time I reached college I'd forgotten Romania's Iron Lady. So had the rest of the world. Purged under Stalin's orders early in the 1950s, Pauker had been arrested and imprisoned. She spent her last years as a shunned person in Bucharest with her daughter's family, dying after a long battle with cancer in 1960.

Three years after her barely noted demise, my own career had progressed to researcher for Newsweek, with volunteer work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Congress of Racial Equality on the side. To my horror, a senior editor who considered himself a wit resurrected the "Ana Pauker" routine. This time I was terrified that the taunt really was about Stalinism or--same thing in those days--about unmasking a red, but Pauker had been out of the news for so long that few of my colleagues caught the joke. The wit concocted a fresh salute, "Mother Bloor of the Eleventh Floor," which was tolerably funny because it didn't quite rhyme.

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