Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  But there was still one hurdle to be faced. She would have to travel three hundred miles by train from St. Petersburg to the American consulate in Riga, Latvia, to apply for a U.S. student visa. Since U.S. diplomatic personnel all over the world—and especially in Eastern Europe, through which tens of thousands of White Russians were trying to flee to freedom every year—rigorously enforced immigration quotas and guarded against “visitors” who really planned to stay, the visa might well be denied. Many of Rand’s acquaintances expected this to happen and looked forward to seeing her back home again before the next snowfall. But Rand never wavered.

  Anna is said to have sold the last of the family jewelry, most of which had long ago been bartered for food and firewood, to help fund Rand’s journey to “the freest country on earth,” as she once called it. The daughter packed her few clothes and her typewriter in a suitcase her grandmother had given her, slipped on her mother’s old Persian lamb jacket, and buried the equivalent of the epic sum of three hundred dollars deep inside her purse. On the afternoon of January 17, sixteen days before her twenty-first birthday, she said good-bye to her mother and father, her grandfather Kaplan, sisters, aunts, and cousins at the Moscow Railroad Station in St. Petersburg. She had asked Lev Bekkerman to be there, and for the first and last time he kissed her hand. As the train began to move, she shouted, “By the time I return, I’ll be famous!” Her family waved until the train was out of sight. Later, Zinovy told Anna, “Just you wait! [Alissa] will yet show the world who she is.”

  Rand did show the world who she was, and the world took notice. She never returned to Russia, but in many ways, she never really left.

  THE

  FREEDOM TO THINK

  1926–1934

  When I am questioned about myself, I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.”

  —“To the Readers of The Fountainhead,” 1945

  The old-style Soviet train took Anna and Zinovy’s gifted eldest daughter from St. Petersburg to Riga, and a newer, faster train took her from Riga to Berlin. There, on January 30, 1926, she met her cousin Vera Guzarchik, who had also received permission to study abroad and was now a medical student at the Institut Robert Koch in Germany. The two young women were photographed together, looking cold but happy in their flapper hats and secondhand finery, outside Berlin’s grand Old National Gallery. They celebrated the new arrival’s twenty-first birthday by going to the movies; they saw Der Wilderer (The Poacher), a romantic idyll starring Carl de Vogt, a German silent-screen Adonis whom Rand adored. From Berlin, she traveled on to Paris and to the port city of Le Havre, from which, on February 10, she sailed for America aboard the French liner S.S. De Grasse. She had a first-class cabin, but the passage was cheap, because winter weather made the Atlantic crossing slow and rough. The voyage took ten days.

  When the ship carrying the five-foot-two, dark-eyed Russian girl lowered its anchor in New York Harbor on the afternoon of February 19, dusk had set in and a light snow had begun to fall. Rand and the other non-Americans on board were held back by U.S. immigration officials, who boarded the ship, examined their visas, and double-checked their travel plans. By the time she reached the open air, the Statue of Liberty was invisible behind her, wrapped in a bank of snow and fog. Looking up, she could see the lower Manhattan skyline, whose stone towers and copper spires pierced the sky in celebration of the American era’s busy faith in commerce. This was the dollar decade, when Americans believed that a talent for achievement and acquisition could and would create a second Garden of Eden on earth, and skyscrapers were the proof and symbol of that faith. For Rand, the brilliantly lighted windows of J. D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Building, the Singer Tower, and the ornately Gothic Woolworth Building, then the tallest and, Rand thought, the most beautiful skyscraper in the world, represented an astonishing display of American inventiveness, energy, economic aspiration, and engineering talent. They were “the will of man made visible” and “the finger of God,” she thought. In a rare display of emotion, she began to cry at the sight of them. Her tears were “tears of splendor,” she recalled in middle age.

  The documents she carried conveyed the important facts about her at the time: she was Alice, a.k.a. Alissa, Rosenbaum, a twenty-one-year-old unmarried Russian female of the Hebrew race. Her immediate destination was Chicago. The ship’s manifest noted that she had promised to return to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, when her temporary American visa expired. But she had no intention of returning. In order to qualify for the visa in Riga, she had told a U.S. consular official that she was engaged to marry a Russian man with whom she was in love and to whom she would unfailingly return. The truth was that from the moment her mother’s cousins agreed to sponsor her, she had decided to resettle in the United States. She was conscious of the new, draconian U.S immigration quotas enacted in 1924, largely to impede the wave of Eastern European Jews trying to enter; if she couldn’t get visa extensions, she had decided to cross the border to Canada or Mexico and wait to re-enter the United States under the Russian permanent-resident quota, which could take many years.

  It’s worth noting that in the 1960s she would become famous for celebrating honesty and integrity as indispensable virtues of her capitalist heroes. “One must never attempt to fake reality in any manner,” she would write in her famous description of the ethical man. That she could sometimes invent, exaggerate, or hide events in her own life in order to advance her hopes or bolster her public image may be partly due to her experience in Russia, especially as a Jew; for generations, small deceptions were a matter of safety or survival for Russian Jews. She made this point explicit when, in middle age, she told friends that an obligation to be truthful ends where the immoral behavior of others makes truth telling damaging to one’s own interests. Surely, she viewed Russia’s closed borders as unjust and immoral, but in later life she would give herself other reasons for moral leniency as well.

  She stayed in New York for four days, the guest of relatives of Mandel Stone, who was the husband of Anna Stone, one of Aunt Eva and Harry Portnoy’s five daughters. These relatives, the Rosens, lived in a new, stately enclave on Sutton Place, near the East River, and so Rand began her American sojourn in style. She later told friends that by then she had only fifty dollars of her travel money left. She must have roamed the bustling city by streetcar and on foot. She would not have easily been able to ask directions, for her spoken English consisted of about a dozen words, “all mispronounced,” she said.

  In 1926, New York, like much of the nation, was reveling in unparalleled prosperity. The miracles of capitalism were visible everywhere: in the Model T cars on the street, the streamlined diesel-electric locomotives roaring into and out of Grand Central Terminal, the automatic traffic lights, animated neon signs, radios, telephones, loudspeakers, electric refrigerators, tickertapes, and pop-up toasters. By day, airplanes buzzed overhead. By night, men and women in formal clothes walked arm in arm to restaurants, Prohibition-era speakeasies, arcades, and Broadway theaters. “I’ll never forget it,” Rand said of her first experience of New York. “It seemed so incredibly cheerful and frivolous, so non-Soviet!” Photographs from this period show her in a 1920s Louise Brooks haircut, a style she would keep until she died. Similarly, her enthusiasm for this free-wheeling, wildly optimistic, largely unregulated pro-capitalist time and place remained a lifelong touchstone of her expectations and her art.

  As in Riga and Berlin, she went to the movies, which then cost thirty-five or fifty cents. In four days in New York, she saw four silent films, including The Girl Who Wouldn’t Work, a courtroom melodrama of the same general type that would bring her early fame as a playwright in 1934. She kept a journal, ranking each movie from zero to five, according to her assessment of its plot, theme, actors, and level of romantic action. Even here, she remained intensely focused on pursuing her long-term professional goals.

  By the time she boarde
d a New York Central train to Chicago, Alice Rosenbaum had chosen a new name: Ayn (pronounced “ein” or “eye-in”) Rand. Because she was determined to move on to Hollywood as soon as she could improve her English, she knew she would need a professional name. A pseudonym would also provide camouflage, if needed, against American immigration officials who, should her visa expire, might try to track her down.

  The name she picked has stirred the curiosity of readers and fueled speculation among fans for half a century. Not particularly American, or Russian, or Jewish, its clipped, mannish syllables are ethnically hard to place and gender neutral; many of her more casual readers have assumed that she was male. When asked in the 1930s and 1940s about her pseudonym, she offered different explanations, sometimes saying that “Ayn” was a Finnish female name or that she borrowed it from a Finnish writer, and at least once claiming that she made it up herself. As to “Rand,” her second cousin Fern Brown, who was eight years old when the older girl came to live with her family in Chicago, remembered Rand’s lighting on it one afternoon while the two of them sat at the family dining table, gazing at the Remington Rand typewriter Rand had brought with her from St. Petersburg. Rand repeated this story, but it can’t be true; for one thing, the Remington Rand was not yet on the market in 1926. For another, her family seems to have been aware of her new surname before she wrote to them from America. Ten years later, in 1936, she told the New York Evening Post that “Rand” was an abbreviation of her Russian surname, and in 1961 said something similar to The Saturday Evening Post. By the late 1990s, a number of followers believed that they had spotted the word “Rand” in a slightly altered version of the first six letters of the Cyrillic spelling of “Rosenbaum” and the word “Ayn” in the last three letters of the name. However, the visual evidence is flimsy, and Rand never claimed to have adapted “Ayn” from “Rosenbaum.”

  The origin of “Ayn” may be more sentimental—and more ethnic—than the creator of a philosophy based on the self-made soul would be likely to admit. In the 1960s, a habitué of lectures on Randian Objectivism remembered asking her whether her father, like the woman’s own, had ever called his daughter by the pet name “Ayin.” Rand smiled and nodded yes, this admirer recalled. The woman explained that her own father had used “Ayin” as an affectionate Jewish diminutive meaning “bright eyes,” derived from the Hebrew word for “eye.” Adding substance to this theory is a letter from Anna Rosenbaum to Rand in the early 1930s, making fond reference to her eldest daughter’s childhood nickname “Ayinotchka”—a perfect Russian-inflected endearment for a little girl with bright, bold, hypnotizing eyes. If, in facing a new world, she adopted a childhood nickname that was a token of her father’s love, the choice is poignant. The derivation of the surname “Rand” remains a mystery.

  In any case, with only two or three exceptions, she did not reveal her birth name to American acquaintances. Some friends and relatives ascribed this oddity to a concern about the barriers then confronting Jews in the United States, who were banned from certain neighborhoods, professions, social organizations, and clubs. Mimi Sutton, Rand’s niece by marriage, who came to know and love her in the 1930s and remained her friend until she died, recalled, “She didn’t want anyone to know that she was Jewish at first. No, she did not. There was a whole period, up until the [Second World] war, when she did not want that known.” Mimi, whose maiden name was Papurt, recalled Rand’s warning her not to reveal that her father’s clan had originated in the city of Berdychiv in the Ukraine. “That’s terrible, Mimi! That’s a Jewish ghetto!” the émigré told her. “She would introduce me as [her husband’s] niece,” said Mimi. “She didn’t use my last name.” Another relative who knew Rand less well, a great-granddaughter of Anna Rosenbaum’s cousin Anna Stone, explained that, in general, the extended family “was very secretive. They all changed their names.” The most important reason for Rand to have changed her name, this woman’s great-grandmother and other family members told her, was that “since she wanted to be a philosopher and have a best-selling book, she could not be a Jewish woman. People didn’t listen to Jewish women.” Although the novelist later said that her primary purpose had been to protect the Rosenbaums from any association with her public persona, for other reasons, discussed later, this explanation seems unlikely. Whatever the rationale, her reluctance to disclose these basic facts about her family of origin was so extreme that not a single one of her close friends or followers knew her real name when she died.

  As Ayn Rand’s train moved west through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, she sat gazing at the wintry fields, dozing or practicing her English, perhaps by reading an American translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the first book she purchased in America. When the train pulled into the LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, her mother’s hospitable and hardworking cousins were on hand to welcome her. Practiced as they were at sponsoring sometimes disorientated Russian-Jewish “greenhorns,” as the family called new immigrants, the Portnoy women buzzed with ideas about what their cousin’s daughter might like to see and do. But they had never sponsored anyone quite as independent as Ayn Rand. She had her own agenda. She even persuaded them to let her see Ben Hur, a silent film about a captive charioteer who outwits his Roman captors, on her first day in Chicago. She liked it; she gave it a rating of four out of five in her journal.

  She had been invited to stay with Anna and Mandel Stone, who were in the dress business. But after some difficulty about the family schedule, she moved in with Fern Brown’s parents, Minna and Sam Goldberg, who owned a small grocery store on Chicago’s North Side, near Lincoln Park, and lived in a neighboring five-room, ground-floor apartment. The parents slept in the front bedroom with their five-year-old son, Harvey. Harry Portnoy, the widowered husband of Anna Rosenbaum’s aunt Eva and the family patriarch, occupied a back alcove. Fern moved to the living-room couch, and Rand slept on Fern’s cot in the dining room. From the first, she focused on her near-term goal, which she half-jokingly referred to as “conquering Hollywood.” She stayed awake and worked at night, as she would periodically do for the rest of her life. She wrote or typed drafts of her screenplays, or movie scenarios—silent-film story lines that were relatively easy for her to compose because they didn’t require dialogue—at the dining-room table. She wrote these in Russian, and a Stone or a Lipton cousin translated them into English. In the middle of the night, she took breaks for long baths, young Harvey Portnoy recalled years later; but first she let the hot water run as long as possible, to kill any germs. Baths were a forgotten luxury in the Russia she had left behind, but cholera and typhoid fever, which thrive in filth, were all too common. The Goldberg family slept fitfully and woke bleary eyed. In the daytime, their guest walked around the apartment singing “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” at the top of her voice, in a Russian-accented contralto that substituted “z’s” for American “th’s.” When Minna Goldberg couldn’t take the noise, she appealed to her sister Anna Stone to resume her share of hospitality, and the newcomer began shuttling between the Goldbergs’ and Stones’ apartments.

  Oddly, Fern Brown recalled, Rand didn’t take any special interest in family meals or food in general, although in middle age she would recall being constantly hungry after coming to America, where she was able to eat as much as she wanted for the first time in years. She spoke little to the adult members of the family and, most strikingly, rarely mentioned her own family or the political situation in St. Petersburg unless she was asked. Even then, she tended to answer in monosyllables, “as though the subject didn’t interest her.” This could not have been because she didn’t care about the welfare of her parents and sisters. Over the next ten years she would write to them often, sending her sister Natasha American sheet music (including period favorites, such as “Yessir, That’s My Baby”), Nora movie memorabilia and clothes, and Anna American proletarian novels to translate for extra income, including Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. She would make at least one serious attempt to bring them all to Ame
rica. But when she did talk, “all she talked about was what she was going to be and going to do,” said Minna Goldberg—in other words, about her future. From the very beginning, her psychological stance toward her personal past seemed to be: Don’t look back. Later, she would say that neither her family of origin nor the country she was born in had any determinative meaning for her, because they were accidental, not chosen by her own free will. She was a “being of self-made soul,” a point of pride.

  As to Chicago, it wasn’t New York or Hollywood, and she viewed it as a stopping-off place en route to the West. (“I felt I was not yet in an American city,” she remarked stiffly, years later.) She did not know that to the north and west of the city lay a scattering of iconographic Prairie houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, who would become her chief model for The Fountainhead’s protagonist, Howard Roark, or that downtown Chicago was seeded with important buildings by Louis Sullivan, a founding father of the skyscraper and, later, one of her inspirations for Roark’s mentor, the architect Henry Cameron. (Like Cameron, Louis Sullivan died in alcoholic poverty and obscurity, just two years before she arrived in Chicago.)

  She spent her time in movie theaters, especially in the South Side theater owned by Sarah Lipton, called the New Lyric. She saw 138 movies between late February and August 1926, largely thanks to passes furnished by Sarah. Sitting in red-plush seats, watching her then-favorite film director Cecil B. DeMille’s The Road to Yesterday and The Volga Boatman (ranked five and five plus, respectively, in her journal), Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (“not even zero”), King Vidor’s La Bohème (only three), and dozens of other now famous classics of the silent screen, she was learning the American vernacular from the films’ title and dialogue boxes and absorbing film vocabulary and style.