Knowing When It's Over

[CCarl]

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men [and women in government] who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men [and women] get richer by graft and by pull than by work; and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded, and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - [When you see all these occurring] - You may know that your society is doomed." [Parentheses are mine.]
― Ayn Rand, from her novel Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957.


Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, in what was then the Russian Empire. The eldest daughter of Jewish bourgeois parents, she spent her early years in comfort thanks to her father's success as a pharmacist. Her father was Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, her mother Anna Borisovna Kaplan.

Alissa was twelve when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Lenin disrupted her family's life. Her father's pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to Crimea, where they lived in poverty. The situation profoundly influenced young Alissa, who developed strong feelings against government intrusion into individual livelihood. She was able to return to St. Petersburg in 1921, now known as Petrograd by the new Soviet Russia. When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, Alissa was among the first to enroll at Petrograd State University. Then she was one of many bourgeois students purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many purged students, including Alissa, were reinstated. She completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924, and then enrolled at the State Institute for Cinema Arts to study screenwriting.

In 1892, one of Anna's aunts, Eva Kaplan Portnoi, had immigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago with her husband, Harry Portnoi, and their eight children. Eva had borrowed part of the money for the family's passage from her brother, Alissa's grandfather Berko Kaplan. The Rosenbaums hadn't heard from the Portnois during World War I nor the Russian Revolution, because mail service was so sporadic. In 1925 they received a letter, and Alissa replied to it, begging 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 Alissa could work there if she liked.

Alissa was granted a passport by the Soviets in the fall of 1925, and was presented an American Student Visa a few months later. The Visa was good for six months. Sixteen days before her twenty-first birthday she said good-bye to all her family, then boarded a train and eventually an ocean liner for America. She arrived in New York in February, 1926, from that day forward she was Ayn Rand, primarily to hide her Jewish heritage. She spent six months in Chicago with her cousins, then travelled to her dream, Hollywood California. She was going to be a screen-writer. Her second day there, she met Cecile B. DeMille and was offered a job as an extra, then as a script reader. And her career as a screen-writer, philosopher, and author of contemporary fiction took off. She witnessed the statement above in her homeland, just as we are witnessing it today in our country.