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 America. 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.)