Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [33]
But there was still one hurdle to be faced. She would have to travel three hundred miles by train from St. Petersburg to the American consulate in Riga, Latvia, to apply for a U.S. student visa. Since U.S. diplomatic personnel all over the world—and especially in Eastern Europe, through which tens of thousands of White Russians were trying to flee to freedom every year—rigorously enforced immigration quotas and guarded against “visitors” who really planned to stay, the visa might well be denied. Many of Rand’s acquaintances expected this to happen and looked forward to seeing her back home again before the next snowfall. But Rand never wavered.
Anna is said to have sold the last of the family jewelry, most of which had long ago been bartered for food and firewood, to help fund Rand’s journey to “the freest country on earth,” as she once called it. The daughter packed her few clothes and her typewriter in a suitcase her grandmother had given her, slipped on her mother’s old Persian lamb jacket, and buried the equivalent of the epic sum of three hundred dollars deep inside her purse. On the afternoon of January 17, sixteen days before her twenty-first birthday, she said good-bye to her mother and father, her grandfather Kaplan, sisters, aunts, and cousins at the Moscow Railroad Station in St. Petersburg. She had asked Lev Bekkerman to be there, and for the first and last time he kissed her hand. As the train began to move, she shouted, “By the time I return, I’ll be famous!” Her family waved until the train was out of sight. Later, Zinovy told Anna, “Just you wait! [Alissa] will yet show the world who she is.”
Rand did show the world who she was, and the world took notice. She never returned to Russia, but in many ways, she never really left.
THE
FREEDOM TO THINK
1926–1934
When I am questioned about myself, I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.”
—“To the Readers of The Fountainhead,” 1945
The old-style Soviet train took Anna and Zinovy’s gifted eldest daughter from St. Petersburg to Riga, and a newer, faster train took her from Riga to Berlin. There, on January 30, 1926, she met her cousin Vera Guzarchik, who had also received permission to study abroad and was now a medical student at the Institut Robert Koch in Germany. The two young women were photographed together, looking cold but happy in their flapper hats and secondhand finery, outside Berlin’s grand Old National Gallery. They celebrated the new arrival’s twenty-first birthday by going to the movies; they saw Der Wilderer (The Poacher), a romantic idyll starring Carl de Vogt, a German silent-screen Adonis whom Rand adored. From Berlin, she traveled on to Paris and to the port city of Le Havre, from which, on February 10, she sailed for America aboard the French liner S.S. De Grasse. She had a first-class cabin, but the passage was cheap, because winter weather made the Atlantic crossing slow and rough. The voyage took ten days.
When the ship carrying the five-foot-two, dark-eyed Russian girl lowered its anchor in New York Harbor on the afternoon of February 19, dusk had set in and a light snow had begun to fall. Rand and the other non-Americans on board were held back by U.S. immigration officials, who boarded the ship, examined their visas, and double-checked their travel plans. By the time she reached the open air, the Statue of Liberty was invisible behind her, wrapped in a bank of snow and fog. Looking up, she could see the lower Manhattan skyline, whose stone towers and copper spires pierced the sky in celebration of the American era’s busy faith in commerce. This was the dollar decade, when Americans believed that a talent for achievement