Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [255]
“a tyrant”: 100 Voices, NR, p. 11. 6
Why won’t they let me have what I want?: Harry Binswanger, “AR’s Life: Highlights and Sidelights,” taped speech delivered at the Thomas Jefferson School, San Francisco, 1993; Barbara Branden, “Holding Court,” rebirthofreason.com, July 2005.
thought that she had been three: Binswanger reports this incident as having occurred when AR was three, but according to the All St. Petersburg Directory, 1907–11, the Rosenbaums moved from Zalbalkanskii Prospekt to Nevsky Prospekt in the fall of 1909 or the winter of 1910, when AR would have been approaching her fifth birthday (Binswanger, “Ayn Rand’s Life”).
recalled sitting at a window: AR seems to have believed that she was two and a half at the time of this incident, but, again, she appears to have been older. The streetcar line opened on Nevsky Prospekt in September 1907, and the Rosenbaums moved to Nevsky only in late 1909 or early 1910, when AR was close to age five, according to the All St. Petersburg Directory. AR may have been remembering a visit she and her father paid to friends or relatives on Nevsky Prospekt (“Ayn Rand’s Life;” “Holding Court”).
explaining the way the streetcars worked: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
became the co-owner of Klinge’s pharmacy: The Directory of the St. Petersburg Merchant Administration, 1906–11, 1916, St. Petersburg.
bought the deed: AR, p. 3.
Anna hired a cook: Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. 4.
took music and drawing lessons: AR, p. 4.
whom … she called by the Russian variant: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
capricious, nagging: “Ayn Rand’s Life;” Dina Schein, “Ayn Rand’s Home Atmosphere: Her Family in Russia,” a lecture based on letters to AR from the Rosenbaums, 1926–35, July 9, 2005, ARI Centennial Conference, Santa Barbara, California.
considered her eldest daughter to be “difficult”: “Holding Court.”
“Make motions, Alice, make motions!”: Author interview with NB, May 5, 2004.
exasperated by her penchant for becoming violently enthusiastic: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
“Every man is an architect of his own fortune”: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
named the family cats after American states and cities: One cat was named Los Angeles, possibly by AR, and another was called Missouri (“Home Atmosphere”).
Anna came from a more privileged background: I was unable to find a full record of Anna’s birth, in 1880, but Anna’s older brother Josel (also known as Jakov) was born in St. Petersburg in 1877, three years before Anna’s birth, and attended the tenth St. Petersburg Secondary School (All St. Petersburg Directory, 1900-04). He went on to Kharkov University, in the Ukraine, to study medicine, and returned to St. Petersburg in about 1900, where he opened a business selling ready-made dresses. His birth in St. Petersburg suggests that Anna was also born there.
owned a factory: Information about AR’s maternal grandfather has been taken from the archives of the All St. Petersburg Directory for the years 1902-6. FB, AR’s second cousin, and other relatives of AR’s mother living in Chicago at the time she arrived there believed that Berko Kaplan was a boot maker, as reported in Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986).
extended family also lived nearby: All St. Petersburg Directory, 1900, 1904. Interestingly, one of Anna’s brothers, Josel Kaplan, lived at number 17 Zagorodnyi Prospekt, the street on which Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian Jewish poet, grew up at number 70. Mandelstam was fourteen years older than AR, but the two could easily have known each other, especially since AR’s father also lived on Zagorodnyi Prospekt—at number 12—in 1904, before he and Anna were married. As it happened, the oldest and most active Russian Jewish educational organization of the time, called the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, occupied number 23 Zagorodnyi Prospekt during the period under discussion (Jews of St. Petersburg, pp. 126, 128-9).
at least a few of Zinovy’s eight brothers and sisters: