“Heel and toe, and away I go”: Ann Dragoon Wasserman, Aug. 8, 1929 – May 27, 2026
My mother, Ann Dragoon Wasserman, a pillar of Berkeley’s cultural and political life since moving to the city in 1963, died last week, 10 weeks shy of her 97th birthday, of natural causes peacefully in her sleep in her North Berkeley home on what would have been her late husband Al’s 96th birthday. She was surrounded by her three children, myself and my two sisters, Rena and Sherry.
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The Wassermans: A family with deep Berkeley roots
Berkeley family’s 60-year saga — People’s Park, Heyday Books, Greek Theatre, leg lifts.
Remembering Al Wasserman, an extraordinarily disciplined person, who possessed an iron will and a warm heart
After settling with his wife in Berkeley in the early 60s, he went to work at the Bechtel Corporation, later becoming a lawyer and serving as president of Berkeley-Albany chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Born in The Bronx just three months before the devastating stock market crash of Oct. 29, 1929, which plunged the country into the decade-long Great Depression, my mother was the youngest of six children, four older brothers — Max, Sam, Morris, and Ben — and a sister Reva. All four brothers served in the Second World War, determined to fight fascism. Her mother died of a stroke at age 56, just days after my mother’s 14th birthday. A year later, Max, age 32, and Sam, age 27, would be killed in Nazi-occupied Europe within four weeks of each other. A month later, she wrote to her best girlfriend Helen Hochberg that “I only have hate in me now. It seems as if everything bad happens to good people. My second brother Sam was killed in action. Can’t write anymore.”
Their deaths, she recalled years later, “left us all in a shocked state, devastated with disbelief. Until this day, I am in denial and believe Sam must be lost, maybe an amnesia victim. My world fell apart. For years I had nightmares. Parts of me died with them. I vowed never to totally love anyone again for fear of losing them. I neglected my schooling and thought surely my heart would break. But I learned to hide my feelings and emotions and managed to somehow go on living — unhappily, miserably, and lonely. War destroys the living too.”
These were wounds that would never heal. Nonetheless, my mother bore her loss with exemplary fortitude. They deepened her commitment to a world of peace and freedom. All her life she opposed war. Outwardly, she remained cheerful; inwardly, she never stopped crying.
My mother’s family, originally from what is now Belarus, was part of that great migration of Russian and East and Central European Jews who had fled the suffocations of Czarist Russia and the antisemitism of the Pale for the promise of a better life in America. Of the estimated 900,000 Belarusian Jews in 1897, a half-million had fled by 1926. Many, like her family, were fiercely anti-religious but proud secular Jews. She recalled that “Neither a Supreme Being nor organized religion was a part of our heritage. My mother and father were nonbelievers. They said, ‘Religion was the opium of the people.’ I did not rebel. My convictions, thoughts, ideas remained with me throughout adulthood. We were non-practicing Jews. My parents did send me to a ‘secular school’ to learn Yiddish, the history, literature, songs and dances of the Jewish people and later, after Yiddish high school, to a college of Yiddish for another year.”
Like many of their fellow Jews, my mother’s family was done with the shibboleths of superstition and the hidebound traditions of Judaism. Instead, they enrolled themselves in a rising movement of socialist and communist idealists, seeking to demolish nationalist and religious barriers under the banner of a worldwide union of the working class. Even so they were loyal to the ideals of Yiddishkeit — that special brand of Jewish humanism and intellectual passion — and to the radical political commitment that was the secular faith of their Eastern European immigrant parents. My mother, together with her husband Al, also a proud son of The Bronx, worked all her long life to celebrate the rich culture and values that her parents had instilled in her through a once-flourishing network of Yiddish schools, choruses, reading circles, orchestras, dramatic societies and summer camps.
Hers was a milieu brilliantly evoked by Vivian Gornick in her indispensable book, “The Romance of American Communism” (1977). Gornick spoke for my mother and many families like hers when she wrote: “It was characteristic of that world that during those hours at the kitchen table with my father and his socialist friends. … I knew that tea and black bread were the most delicious food and drink in the world, that political talk filled the room with a terrible excitement and a richness of expectation, that here in the kitchen I felt the same electric thrill I felt when Rouben, my Yiddish teacher, pressed my upper arm between two bony fingers and, his eyes shining behind thick glasses, said to me: ‘Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything.’”
My mother’s father, Harry Dragoon, and her mother, Rose Sussman, both born in what is now Belarus, then a part of Russia, left their natal land in November 1910 — Harry partly to avoid being conscripted into the czar’s army and partly because of his and Rose’s participation in the radical activities that were a hallmark of the failed 1905 Revolution — and made their way to Hamburg, Germany, from which port they then set sail on the Batavia to New York. Some years later, Harry would become the owner of a dry-cleaning factory with many employees. But the onset of the Depression forced him to declare bankruptcy. With my mother’s birth, hard times had arrived.
She knew her family was poor as they constantly and abruptly left one apartment for another (six homes in as many years), just ahead of the landlord seeking to collect the rent they didn’t have. Among my mother’s papers, she left this description of her family’s straitened circumstances: “I would jump or leap through the air onto the table for fear of mice running around on the floor, which was how I first discovered my dancing ability at age ten. We were on ‘home-relief’ — very, very poor. I was told ‘don’t open the door when someone rings the bell’ as it could be the man to shut off our gas and electricity for not paying the monthly bills.” The family was so poor that her brother Morris had to drop out of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, one of the best public schools in New York, because they couldn’t afford the 10 cents it cost for the round-trip subway ride from the Bronx.
My mother began dancing as a young girl and did so, as she later put it, “to escape the despair of poverty, upheaval, and war of the 1930s and 1940s. And I have been exercising ever since. I still prefer dance as my form of exercise — with music playing I can folk dance, modern dance, or even do ballet. I have found throughout my life that dance stimulates my mind, body, and soul. I urge all people — children to seniors — to find the exercise form that provides them that kind of nourishment. With dancing, I feel strong, happy, and young — a natural high!” Her great mentor was the legendary left-wing choreographer and poet Edith Segal whose classes she took in 1945 and who would encourage her at the summer camp she worked at in 1946 and ’47.
The turning point for my mother came early when she accompanied her brother Morris to a dramatic audition at the Henry Street Playhouse. He didn’t get the part, but she was asked to try out for a part in the chorus of dancers. Her talent was palpable and she was urged to see the great George Balanchine at the School of American Ballet. She was accepted into the program. In 1948, Balanchine established the New York City Ballet and my mother was invited to join the corps of gifted dancers.
At 14, my mother met Al Wasserman in the Yiddish Shule they both attended. They quickly fell in love and six years later, on June 24, 1950, married, for which Al had to receive special permission from his parents as he was a year younger than she and at 20 was not yet considered an adult, according to New York state law. Edith Segal sent my mother, her favorite student, a telegram of congratulations: “May your marriage blossom in a world of peace and freedom.” Al’s parents were also immigrants, from Chelm, Poland, his father arriving in America in 1922 and his mother in 1928. His father, Sam, was a sewing machine operator, an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and a contributor of short stories, nonfiction essays and columns to the Yiddish Communist Morgen Freiheit newspaper, which my mother’s family read religiously.
Both families were poor, too poor to send their offspring to Camp Kinderland in Hopewell Junction, New York, founded in 1923 by radical Jewish garment-industry workers as a place for the preservation and perpetuation of the socialist ideals that were so much a part of Jewish life in the sweatshops and factories of New York. Kinderlanders would attend Yiddish language classes, participate in dances and dramas in the manner of social realism, and gather around campfires at night to sing Yiddish working-class songs whose haunting melodies they would never forget. Dick Flacks, one of the principal founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was a Kinderland counselor in the mid-1950s. “It was a great place for rapid intimacy. The test was if you kept seeing each other in the city when one lived in Brooklyn and the other lived in the Bronx.”
My mother and her boyfriend Al got jobs as counselors and for two unforgettable summers— in 1946 and ’47—they cemented their love for each other at Kinderland. They made lifelong friends. Kinderland remained a touchstone for them both. Harriet Holtzmann, one of my mother’s close friends, remembered Kinderland as “a place where I had no fear of discussing politics, where my friends understood about shule [Yiddish secular school] and about May Day. How nice it was to learn the Internationale in Yiddish and feel part of a worldwide ‘family’ when I marched singing with clenched fist raised into the dining room.”
When my mother, barely able to speak, lay dying last week, I spoke to her of the time when she was a young girl hoisted atop her father’s shoulders, attending the May Day demonstration in New York’s Union Square, surrounded by thousands singing the Internationale in Yiddish. I played her the anthem on my iPhone. To my astonishment, she began mouthing the Yiddish lyrics, a faraway look in her eyes.
My father would enter Cooper Union to study civil engineering, along with Milton Glaser, a friend who’d grown up with him in the Workers Cooperative Colony (the Coops) in the Bronx, the country’s first racially integrated housing, built in 1928. Glaser would go on to become America’s preeminent graphic designer. My mother always maintained that she and Glaser had enjoyed a lifelong crush on each other.
Meanwhile, her brother Morris who’d been posted to the Kaiser shipyards in Portland, Oregon, during the war, had decided to settle in Oregon. He kept writing to the family back in the Bronx that he couldn’t get over all the trees and how green it was all year round. My father got a summer job helping to build the highway then being constructed between Mount Hood and Portland. He too wrote back how green it was.
Two years after their marriage, my parents, my mother eight months pregnant with me, the first of what would be three children, joined her brother and his wife in Portland. It was a move also prompted by the growing terror unleashed by the Red Scare of the 1950s. Many New York radicals fled the hothouse precincts of The Bronx and elsewhere. Portland and indeed much the Pacific Northwest had been a haven welcoming East Coast activists seeking to escape the persecutions of a growing anti-Communist hysteria. The Northwest had a long tradition of political iconoclasm.
My parents were welcomed into a circle of activists, many originally from New York, that had, against the odds, thrived in a kind of internal exile. They included Sam Markson, an organizer of the Portland Sign Painters Union. Like my mother’s brother Morris, he too had come to Portland during the war to work in the shipyards. Later, in 1954, he would be expelled from the union for his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The first Kaiser Permanente clinic, established in 1947, was denounced three years later as “socialized medicine.” Many potential members stayed away. The nonprofit clinic was saved by the mass enrollment of 1,500 families from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), led by Harry Bridges, condemned as a Communist. My mother’s good friends and veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Dr. Bernard Malbin and wife Virginia, supported the effort but were later purged from Kaiser as “Marxists and Communists.” Rose Leopold, another close friend of my parents, arrived in Portland in 1951. She had joined the Communist Party in New York in the 1930s as a college student. The atmosphere in Portland was heavy with government surveillance and fear. Rose and her husband Bernie courageously opened their home to other activists, inviting people to speak on issues of the day. Rose remembered that “We all expected the FBI. I knew my phone was tapped. … The FBI did come to the door, but I said, ‘I’m not talking to you.” From Rose, my mother learned to instruct us never to identify ourselves first when the phone rang, but to ask, “Who wants to know?” Bill and Helen Gordon were highly regarded pillars of Portland’s Jewish Community Center from the early 1950s, and quickly befriended my parents. Together they championed early childhood education, community leadership, and social activism. These folks, among others, were unsung heroes of the Left, keeping hope alive in dark times. They were inspirations to my parents. Pete Seeger, among other stars in the Left’s pantheon, regularly appeared at meetings held in private homes, including our home, dandling on his knees the children of these far-flung comrades, as I remember from the time I was 4 and 5 years old, trying his best to boost morale amidst a rising reactionary tide.
In 1963, my parents moved to Berkeley. A year later, the Free Speech Movement erupted. My parents quickly sought the friendship — nay, comradeship — of malcontents and bohemians who had down the decades turned Berkeley into one of the country’s magnetic poles of dissent and protest. My mother and father’s radical patriotism and socially conscious ethics found an echo of enthusiasm in the ethos that informed Berkeley. My mother was inducted into the inner circle of longtime troublemakers like Barbara Dane and Malvina Reynolds, the folksingers and musical troubadours, and Jessica Mitford, the quixotic muckraker with the aristocratic English pedigree who regularly punctured the pompous and the duplicitous with her instinct for the jugular and her unerring wit and withering irony. My mother befriended Madeleine Duckles, a member since the 1940s of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom chapter in Berkeley. My parents became fast friends with a coterie of like-minded couples, including Pat and Fred Cody, Ruth and John Dunbar, Julia and Hy Schwendinger, Ruth and Gene Glick. Ann Fagan Ginger, founder of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Library, and her husband Jim Fenton Wood, loomed large.
Soon the entire Wasserman family was participating in the many demonstrations against the growing American war in Vietnam and the ongoing fight against racism. “In 1965,” my mother remembered, “we took part in the [civil rights] Selma protest with all three of our kids. We marched across the Golden Gate Bridge.” In a letter to friends back in New York, she wrote of the march that “Slogans were shouted, songs were sung and in spite of the slight complaints of getting tired of walking, we felt it was a good exposure to this activity for the kids.” Our family regularly attended the satirical performances of the ribald and rambunctious San Francisco Mime Troupe. When I was 12, I wanted to borrow from the Berkeley Public Library Nevil Shute’s antinuclear novel, “On the Beach,” which two years before had been turned into a movie by Stanley Kramer starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. I was refused by the librarian who told me that adult books were forbidden for children. My mother was outraged and marched into the library where she told the librarian that she didn’t ban books in her family and that she wouldn’t stand for any such stricture being imposed on her children. We were free to read whatever we wished no matter our age. She got her way and we left with the offending book safely in hand.
Timing is everything and soon the Bay Area to which my parents moved was engulfed by multiple and successive protests. The most notable included the great civil rights sit-ins of the spring of 1964 at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in San Francisco, along with the Auto Row demonstrations seeking an end to racial discrimination, which began in late 1963 and continued through the spring of 1964; the Free Speech Movement in the fall of 1964, followed by one of the nation’s first teach-ins, organized by the Vietnam Day Committee in May 1965, which both my parents attended along with me, their 12-year old son; and, three months later, the efforts to prevent the passage of troop trains through Berkeley. Then came the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966 and the riotous antidraft demonstrations in Oakland in 1967, the Third World Liberation strike at UC Berkeley in February 1969, culminating in the violent suppression of People’s Park, which our entire family had helped to create. My mother also found time to support the efforts of the East Bay Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) by raising funds to contribute to the cause of civil rights. She would also become a leader in the Berkeley Citizens Action party, which helped push the city to the left in the late 1960s and early ’70s. These key events formed the epic backdrop to her modest efforts to do all she could to make the world a better place.
My mother’s love of dance found expression in her youngest daughter, Sherry, who started ballet classes at age 6 shortly after the family moved to Berkeley. Two years later, she would be cast as Clara, the lead role in Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” as mounted and performed by the San Francisco Ballet Company. My parents made it a point to attend as many performances of visiting dance companies as they could. In 1965 alone, my mother noted in a letter to East Coast friends, they’d seen the Moiseyev dance troupe, the Mexican Ballet Folklorico, and the Igor Youskevitch dance troupe at UC Berkeley. She joined that year a modern dance group of, as she put it, “eight frustrated would-be dancers.” Three years later, my mother received a California state teaching credential permitting her to teach adults “gymnastics for good health.” In 1968, she started her own studio, teaching dance/exercise classes, four days a week, for women. Only with the arrival of COVID in March of 2020, more than a half century later, when my mother was 90 years old, did she reluctantly retire, ending her astonishing career of inspiring women. To the end of her life, she maintained a rigorous regimen of exercise, getting in her 10,000 steps a day, until a fall a month before her death ended her mobility.
My mother was known throughout her life for her gregariousness, her cheerful disposition, her pride in the achievements of her three children and many grandchildren. My sister Rena particularly remembers our mother’s indispensable presence and helpful participation with the birth of three of her four daughters.
About a year before her death, I asked my mother what wisdom she had to offer, after having lived so long and fruitful a life. She said, “Two words.” And then: “Keep moving.”
Like clockwork, my mother could be regularly found — for decades — hanging out with various comrades at the old Berkeley French Café, across the street from Chez Panisse, discussing the problems of our tormented world. She never ordered coffee, insisting that her family was from Russia and so drank tea, never coffee. Despite having moved to the West Coast in 1952, she never lost her Bronx accent nor her Bronx moxie. She was forthright, outspoken, fearless. Despite private pain caused by the early death of her mother and her two oldest brothers, she chose happiness.
But in recent years, the façade began to crack and old traumas surfaced. She had begun to post, from time to time, on her Facebook page, in a giant font, the simple word: DEATH. I received messages of concern from extended family members. What was going on?
I dropped by the café and asked: “Mom, why do you post DEATH on your Facebook page? It alarms the family. I get calls. You once told me that if you had nothing nice to say, don’t say anything. So why not instead post LIFE? Wouldn’t that be nicer?”
She looked at me and said evenly, “You’re born, you live, you die.” And then, “Get over it.” She stood tall and struck a dancer’s pose, and said: “Heel and toe, and away I go.”
My mother is survived by her three children, eight grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. At her request, there will be no service or memorials. Also, at her request, donations in her honor may be made to Camp Kinderland, PO Box 119, Easthampton, MA 01027; or to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday Books and lives in Berkeley. He is the author of “Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.”