New York Marxist School's Annette Rubinstein, 1912-2007

Liz Mestres, Brecht Forum

Our dear friend and teacher Annette T. Rubinstein died in her sleep last night at the age of 97.
Annette began working with The Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School when we first opened
our doors in the Fall of 1975 and continued to teach wonderful classes on literature, drama and
politics until her last class on Brecht’s Galileo this Spring. She was a constant inspiration and
we will miss her terribly.
A mermorial will be held and we will let you know when the date is set.

A tribute to Annette Rubinstein is found below:Annette T. Rubinstein: 95th Birthday Celebration

Gerald Meyer, Monthly Review, May 2005

Annette T. Rubinstein—educator, author, activist—celebrated her
ninety-fifth birthday three days early on April 9, at the Brecht Forum’s
new headquarters. At a gathering of more than two hundred of her devoted
family, friends, colleagues, comrades, speakers regaled the audience
with personal stories and memories of Annette’s fabulous life. John
Mage, representing Monthly Review, suggested that she must have had
previous lives because “the breadth of vision, the historical
understanding, and the contents of the memory could not have been
acquired in one lifetime—even hers.” Harry Magdoff, via a taped
recording, reminded the audience that “Annette in personality, in her
life of creativity, activity, and humanism, illustrates the ways of
Socialist women and men.” He concluded by saying “I love you”—in Yiddish.

For seventy years, Annette has been active in left politics. During the
thirties, she played increasingly important roles in the movements for
the unemployed and the defense of the Spanish Republic. She was a major
leader of the American Labor Party, under whose banner, in two special
elections in 1949, she ran for State Assembly (winning nearly one in six
votes) and for Congress against Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. Her work in
the ALP brought her into close collaboration with Vito Marcantonio,
whose Congressional record she documented in I Vote My Conscience:
Debates, Speeches, and Writings of Vito Marcantonio.

Annette is a consummate teacher, who taught at the School for Democracy,
its successor, the Jefferson School, and since its founding thirty years
ago, the Brecht Forum. She also served as a high school principal, until
1952, when the Attorney General of New York State forced her departure
from that post. Her revenge was to go the New York Library where she
began the process of producing an unending stream of books, articles,
and reviews. Since its inception, Annette has maintained a close
relationship with Monthly Review. She has steadily contributed book
reviews and an occasional article for the journal; Monthly Review Press
has published her most important work, the two-volume, The Great
Tradition in English Literature: From Shakespeare to Shaw, which very
much remains in print.

Annette closed her ninety-fifth birthday celebration with a most thought
provoking and affecting talk. She reported that she had had “an
extraordinarily fortunate life. . . . [Despite] the great many
tragedies, what has made it a very happy one are two reasons. . . . I do
have a real passion for poetry, and that actually, even in the darkest
times, art . . . is very important.” A second reason Annette cited was
that she had “a great cause to believe in. . . .”

Annette closed with something that brought these two main stays of her
life together—a six-line poem by Bertolt Brecht, where, in Annette’s
estimation, “he succeeded in summing up the law of dialectics”:

Everything changes.

You can begin a new life with your latest breath.

What has happened has happened.

The water you poured into the wine cannot be drained off,

But everything changes.

You can begin a new life with your latest breath.

Dr. Rubinstein has never ceased being able to make being a leftist
meaningful for herself and through her activities for others. She has
flourished in the good times and turned the adversity of the bad times
to good advantage. Her steadiness of purpose has attracted and
encouraged and inspired so many others to the struggle for socialism.



Annette, who one speaker explained “has everything,” suggests that in
lieu of presents friends, students, and other well wishers who are so
moved can send contributions to the capital fund of the Brecht Forum,
which is currently renovating a new headquarters, at 451 West Street NYC
11014.