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By Root 1482 0

was a bustling center of White Russian resistance to the Communists and was full of transplanted czarist military officers, aristocrats, statesmen, manufacturers, and merchants from the north. Rand later told a friend that she and her family were forced to walk all the way from Leningrad (as St. Petersburg came to be known in 1924) to Odessa, a journey of nine hundred miles. This is unlikely, especially as she told another friend that the railroad train in which the family traveled broke down in the Ukraine and that they and other passengers hired horse-drawn carts to continue their journey, adding that the carts were robbed by a gang of bandits. In this story, Zinovy managed to safeguard his savings of several thousand rubles by burying them in the straw that lined a cart. It may be that the family was forced to walk after the robbery, though Rand recalled climbing back in the cart, or that the family walked during another leg of the journey and the child recalled the ordeal as being longer than it was.

In any case, Rand remembered rocky terrain, broken shoes, hunger, darkness, terror, defiance. If she was going to die, she remembered thinking at the time of the robbery, she would die on her own terms, picturing Hugo’s young hero Enjolras. Her last thought would be of his steadfastness and courage, “not of Russia nor the horrors.” Later in life, she would prove herself gifted at focusing on distant ideals in the face of unpleasant realities. Yet another quality comes to light here: a propensity for imagining characters as more real than the people around her. As an adult she would ask friends, “But would you want to meet” the characters in a novel they were reading? If the answer was no, she considered the discussion finished. Fictional heroes and villains lived and breathed for Rand, and her own larger-than-life characters came to define the limits of an imagined world so compelling that many admirers who entered it never left.

Rand and her parents and sisters lingered briefly in the Ukraine, where a number of Zinovy’s cousins practiced medicine and where Zinovy might have expected to find work. The Bolsheviks were making military inroads there, too, however. So the Rosenbaums moved on, as originally planned, to the Crimea. For the next three years, they lived in Yevpatoria, a resort town near the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula, on the Black Sea. The town stood only one hundred miles from Yalta, where the Nabokovs were staying, but Rand didn’t know this; she believed that Olga and her family had left the country in 1917. Since the Rosenbaums had taken summer vacations on the Black Sea in better days, Yevpatoria may have been familiar to them. Side by side with thousands of other refugees from the Red Terror, they searched for shelter, paid work, and food. They found a small, damp, unheated house in which to live. Zinovy eventually opened a pharmacy, but this was looted and shut down, either by renegade White Russian soldiers, invading Reds, or the staunchly anti-Semitic local Orthodox peasants who rampaged against the Jews whenever the Whites were in retreat. The town changed hands four or five times. Fifty-five years later, Rand remembered the terror of the Red Army and the empty, “smelly,” “Holy Russian” religious bromides of the Whites with almost equal loathing. The family lived “on a battlefield,” she said.

During the years in Yevpatoria, she and her sisters, Natasha and Nora, attended a private girls’ school. Here, in the last remaining corner of Russia not permanently occupied by Reds, the schools were free of the Communist curriculum that had taken hold elsewhere. Among other subjects, Rand studied math, which she loved, Russian language and literature, which she claimed to have hated, and Aristotelian syllogistic logic, which taught her to prize rigor and strive for consistency. At the time, she recalled, she knew little about Aristotle except that he was supposed to be an archenemy of Plato, whom she took to be a virtuous idealist, as opposed to a vulgar Communistic materialist, and so she expected