Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [34]
The documents she carried conveyed the important facts about her at the time: she was Alice, a.k.a. Alissa, Rosenbaum, a twenty-one-year-old unmarried Russian female of the Hebrew race. Her immediate destination was Chicago. The ship’s manifest noted that she had promised to return to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, when her temporary American visa expired. But she had no intention of returning. In order to qualify for the visa in Riga, she had told a U.S. consular official that she was engaged to marry a Russian man with whom she was in love and to whom she would unfailingly return. The truth was that from the moment her mother’s cousins agreed to sponsor her, she had decided to resettle in the United States. She was conscious of the new, draconian U.S immigration quotas enacted in 1924, largely to impede the wave of Eastern European Jews trying to enter; if she couldn’t get visa extensions, she had decided to cross the border to Canada or Mexico and wait to re-enter the United States under the Russian permanent-resident quota, which could take many years.
It’s worth noting that in the 1960s she would become famous for celebrating honesty and integrity as indispensable virtues of her capitalist heroes. “One must never attempt to fake reality in any manner,” she would write in her famous description of the ethical man. That she could sometimes invent, exaggerate, or hide events in her own life in order to advance her hopes or bolster her public image may be partly due to her experience in Russia, especially as a Jew; for generations, small deceptions were a matter of safety or survival for Russian Jews. She made this point explicit when, in middle age, she told friends that an obligation to be truthful ends where the immoral behavior of others makes truth telling damaging to one’s own interests. Surely, she viewed Russia’s closed borders as unjust and immoral, but in later life she would give herself other reasons for moral leniency as well.
She stayed in New York for four days, the guest of relatives of Mandel Stone, who was the husband of Anna Stone, one of Aunt Eva and Harry Portnoy’s five daughters. These relatives, the Rosens, lived in a new, stately enclave on Sutton Place, near the East River, and so Rand began her American sojourn in style. She later told friends that by then she had only fifty dollars of her travel money left. She must have roamed the bustling city by streetcar and on foot. She would not have easily been able to ask directions, for her spoken English consisted of about a dozen words, “all mispronounced,” she said.
In 1926, New York, like much of the nation, was reveling in unparalleled prosperity. The miracles of capitalism were visible everywhere: in the Model T cars on the street, the streamlined diesel-electric locomotives roaring into and out of Grand Central Terminal, the automatic traffic lights, animated neon signs, radios, telephones, loudspeakers, electric refrigerators, tickertapes, and pop-up toasters. By day, airplanes buzzed overhead. By night, men and women in formal clothes walked arm in arm to restaurants, Prohibition-era speakeasies, arcades, and Broadway theaters. “I’ll never forget it,” Rand said of her first experience of New York. “It seemed so incredibly cheerful and frivolous, so non-Soviet!” Photographs from this period show her in a 1920s Louise Brooks haircut, a style she would keep until she