While still at the university, she outlined another novel foreshadowing her masterwork, Atlas Shrugged. This novel concerned a beautiful, spirited American heiress who lures Europe’s greatest men to follow her to America. The Europeans are quickly becoming Communists, and the heiress wants to entice all men of ability to withdraw to a better world. A Frenchman is appointed by the Europeans to conquer and collectivize America. Our heroine offers him a million dollars to join her instead; he, in turn, offers her two million to come to work for him. They fall in love. The plot, though complicated, ends in the collapse of the Europeans. The heiress’s assistant in the novel is named Eddie Willers, the name Rand would also give to her heroine Dagny Taggart’s assistant in Atlas Shrugged—where John Galt lures all men of ability to withdraw to his mountain hideout.
In October 1924, diploma in hand, the nineteen-year-old Rand enrolled in a new performing-arts school called the State Technicum for Screen Arts, founded with Lenin’s explicit support in 1922 as a training camp for aspiring actors and cinematographers. The Bolsheviks viewed motion pictures as a promising new weapon in the international propaganda war between Communism and capitalism, and they offered free tuition to any ideologically qualified student who applied. (Rand probably would not have been admitted had her mother Anna not joined the Communist teachers’ union in February 1923, very likely to Rand’s and Zinovy’s disapproval.) She hoped to learn the techniques of screenwriting, and had a special reason: By now, she was determined to find a way to immigrate to America and work in the new and rapidly growing movie industry. This would be a manageable prelude to writing publishable plays and novels, which she knew would require English-language and literary skills she didn’t yet possess. The only alternative to emigration she could fathom, she later said, was to remain in Russia and oppose Communism by writing satirical films attacking it. She and her mother both foresaw that this road would be short and lead to death. Anna supported her dream of emigration; her father, fearful and perhaps dependent on her intellectual companionship, did not.
By spring, the way to America found her, through Anna’s relatives in Chicago. In the late 1890s, one of Anna’s aunts, Eva Kaplan, had immigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago with her husband, Harry Portnoy, and their eight children. Eva had borrowed part of the money for the family’s passage from her brother, Rand’s grandfather Berko Kaplan, and felt indebted to him. The Rosenbaums hadn’t heard from the Portnoys during World War I and the Russian Revolution, because mail service from the West had been interrupted. Now they received a letter, and Rand begged Anna to ask Eva’s grown daughters Minna Goldberg, Anna Stone, and Sarah Lipton to sponsor her for a visit to America. The Chicago cousins had brought over other Russian Jews, both inside and outside the family, and they readily agreed and sent the necessary affidavit of support. What’s more, Sarah Lipton owned and operated a Chicago movie theater, and she promised that Rand could work there if she liked. With affidavit in hand, in the spring of 1925 Rand applied for a Soviet passport, with the declared intention of visiting the United States for six months and of returning to Russia to make propaganda films. Luckily, a tiny window of opportunity remained open for Russians to go abroad; within two years, that and almost every other window of escape would slam shut.
While Rand waited anxiously for passport permission to be granted or denied, she wrote a long essay for the State Technicum Institute on the subject of her favorite movie actress, the Polish-American silent-film star Pola Negri. In the essay, which was discovered in a St. Petersburg library after Rand’s death, she characterized Negri in terms that suited her as well. Whereas “Francesca Bertini is a prizewinning beauty,” she wrote, “Pola Negri is unattractive. Gloria Swanson dazzles the eye with … the originality of her outfits; Pola Negri has no taste in clothing. Mary Pickford conquers hearts with her childlike tenderness …; Pola Negri is a gloomy, intense, cruel woman.” What was the secret of Pola Negri’s success? She was “a proud woman-conqueror.” After a “difficult, joyless childhood,” Rand continued amiably, the actress was “insolent” on screen and in life. Once, when she had been confronted by a Polish border guard who refused to let her pass until she handed over her jewelry, she proved “ready to crush the man who dared to stand in her way.” That Negri had immigrated to America and become one of the earliest foreign-born Hollywood studio stars added to her allure; the dark-eyed actress had “been able to conquer Americans’ cold distrust of Europeans, their patriotism,” wrote the Russian girl who had not yet been to America. In 1925, the essay Pola Negri was published in Moscow as one of a series of pamphlets about popular actors. It was Rand’s first published work.
She was granted a passport in the fall of 1925. She and her mother sent away for French passenger ships’ brochures, and when the pamphlets arrived the whole family gathered to look at them. Alissa might soon be embarking on an odyssey into this fantastically colorful world of shipboard cafés, well-dressed men and women, laughter and gaiety. Passage was booked for late January; Harry Portnoy, Eva Kaplan’s widowered husband, and his daughter Anna Stone helped to pay the fare. At Anna Rosenbaum’s suggestion, her daughter arranged for English lessons from a British expatriate who had remained in the Russian capital after the revolution, perhaps paying the woman out of her small salary as a part-time tour guide at the Peter and Paul Fortress, a former czarist prison.
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.
THREE
THE FREEDOM TO THINK
1926–1934