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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