Editor, educator, and mother of environmental advocates, beloved matriarch Anne Ausubel died peacefully at home in Manhattan in her cherished Upper West Side apartment on July 28, 2026. In July 2025, Anne celebrated her 105th birthday at a raucous party in the family home in Oak Bluffs, covered by The MV Times. The family had begun celebrating Anne’s birthday on-Island in 1955.
Born into privation and strife, Anne lived many lives far surpassing anything she could have expected, and she passed filled with gratitude and surrounded by love from her relations and the countless friends she attracted over the course of her 106 years. Anne was born in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania, to Lotte and Phillip Weisinger, nine months after Phillip returned from Sardinia, where he had been a prisoner of war. Phillip had served in the Austro-Hungarian Army until captured by Italian soldiers in trench warfare in the battles Ernest Hemingway made famous in “A Farewell to Arms.” Romanian nationalism, anti-Semitism, and emerging fascism made America a dream, and fortunately Phillip obtained U.S. citizenship, which he could share with his family.
Anne emigrated in 1928 on the Red Star Line’s SS Pennland with her mother, joining her brother Leonard, sister Esther, and father, aunts, and relatives in Brooklyn. Anne quickly assimilated by finding second homes at the Stone Avenue library, where she became a voracious reader, and at the triple-feature, nickel matinees of the movie palaces of the era. She read almost every book in the library, immersing herself in literature, history, and biography far beyond her years. Movies propelled a lifelong passion for the silver screen, theater, and the arts. She had perfect recall for names of characters as well as actors, and for dialogue from obscure films, not just favored classics like “Casablanca.”
At the age of 10, she met her true love and future husband, Herman Ausubel, in Hebrew school, where he dipped her long braids in the ink on his desk. Despite her academic prowess at Thomas Jefferson High School (known then as Tomashevski), the Great Depression compelled her to go to work in 1937, and she retired only in 1995. In 1943 she married Herman in Moscow, Idaho, where he was training in the Signal Corps. Following the war, she got a dream job as executive secretary to the fabled editor of Variety, Abel Green, which enabled her to revel in show business. The birth of her first son, Kenny, was announced in Variety in 1949.
In 1948 Herman became an assistant and later full professor of European history at Columbia University, and with Kenny’s birth, Anne assumed the additional roles of faculty wife and mother, with her second son Jesse born in 1951. She loved hosting parties where she cooked all the food, and never, up to her last day in 2026, allowed prepared foods into her home. During the 1950s Anne edited the Lookout, a magazine which featured perspectives on the maritime industry and seafarer stories.
In 1955, a neighbor with a strong Boston accent suggested to Anne in the elevator that the family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and connected Anne to Realtor Jimmy Rego. That first summer the family rented a home on Pennacook Avenue from Amy Gilkes, and then for many years stayed on Tuckernuck Avenue, next to the Hughes family. The second day of the vacation in 1955, a pediatric medical matter led to a visit to the office of Dr. David Rappaport on Circuit Avenue, and a lifelong friendship with David and his wife Adeline and subsequent generations of Rappaports. A lasting friendship also developed with year-round residents Helen and Bernie Issokson. Among seasonal residents, Stanley and Leda Burnshaw on Lambert’s Cove Road were especially close friends.
In 1976 Herman developed cancer, and died soon after at the age of 56. Crushed, Anne resolved to embrace her freedom and agency. Anne had begun working in 1970 at the Professional Children’s School (PCS), already famous for such alumni as Rita Moreno and Beverly Sills, and she there wove her passions for children, education, show business, and the arts into a 25-year love affair, caring for students such as actresses Sarah Jessica Parker and Trini Alvarado, and violinist Midori. She helped Kieran Culkin trick-or-treat as a pregnant nun. Right up until her death, former kids and colleagues from PCS continued to visit at her apartment.
In the latter part of her life, Anne enjoyed frequent-flyer miles accumulated by Jesse (an environmental scientist at the Rockefeller University in Manhattan and the Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole) to visit the Great Wall of China, the Kremlin, the Panama Canal, Australia, Japan, and many times Ireland and England, where she had especially close friends. She often traveled with four beloved cousins, “Pearl’s Pearls,” named for her grandmother Pearl. She made friends wherever she went, and often corresponded with them for decades with letters so memorable that many people saved them. She was known for a mordant sense of humor and irreverence, and memory for detail. Her granddaughter, Ramona, a successful author, wrote her first novel, “No One Is Here Except All of Us,” inspired by Anne’s stories.
An adamant urbanite, Anne developed a love of nature on the Vineyard. She expanded a thriving community of friends on the Island after Jesse acquired a house and orchard in Oak Bluffs in 1990. She was eager for news of the cherry trees, and baked a hundred pies. She also built a large community of friends at the annual Bioneers conference, an environmental and social justice gathering in California which her son Kenny co-founded in 1990. She met personal “sheroes” such as primatologist Jane Goodall and oceanographer Sylvia Earle, and gleefully wrote small checks to nonprofits supporting animal protection and ecological conservation.
Anne voted in every election from 1942 through the June Democratic primary in 2026. In recent years she loved going to her polling place and declaring loudly, “I voted for Franklin Roosevelt.” She thrived at parties, and spoke easily with young people. Into her 104th year she did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day, quickly, with a pen.
Anne did not spend a single night in the hospital during 2025, and she was blessed with memory and mobility up to her final days. Anne often remarked, “Leave ’em laughing,” show business advice to end a performance on a high note so people remember you fondly.
Anne is survived by her beloved sons, Kenneth and Jesse Ausubel; granddaughter Ramona, great-grandchildren Clay and Prairie; niece Penny Pearlman; her two daughters-in-law who became the daughters she never had, Nora Ryerson and Nina Simons; and a wide circle of loyal friends whom she called the “true blues.”
