Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [35]
As in Riga and Berlin, she went to the movies, which then cost thirty-five or fifty cents. In four days in New York, she saw four silent films, including The Girl Who Wouldn’t Work, a courtroom melodrama of the same general type that would bring her early fame as a playwright in 1934. She kept a journal, ranking each movie from zero to five, according to her assessment of its plot, theme, actors, and level of romantic action. Even here, she remained intensely focused on pursuing her long-term professional goals.
By the time she boarded a New York Central train to Chicago, Alice Rosenbaum had chosen a new name: Ayn (pronounced “ein” or “eye-in”) Rand. Because she was determined to move on to Hollywood as soon as she could improve her English, she knew she would need a professional name. A pseudonym would also provide camouflage, if needed, against American immigration officials who, should her visa expire, might try to track her down.
The name she picked has stirred the curiosity of readers and fueled speculation among fans for half a century. Not particularly American, or Russian, or Jewish, its clipped, mannish syllables are ethnically hard to place and gender neutral; many of her more casual readers have assumed that she was male. When asked in the 1930s and 1940s about her pseudonym, she offered different explanations, sometimes saying that “Ayn” was a Finnish female name or that she borrowed it from a Finnish writer, and at least once claiming that she made it up herself. As to “Rand,” her second cousin Fern Brown, who was eight years old when the older girl came to live with her family in Chicago, remembered Rand’s lighting on it one afternoon while the two of them sat at the family dining table, gazing at the Remington Rand typewriter Rand had brought with her from St. Petersburg. Rand repeated this story, but it can’t be true; for one thing, the Remington Rand was not yet on the market in 1926. For another, her family seems to have been aware of her new surname before she wrote to them from America. Ten years later, in 1936, she told the New York Evening Post that “Rand” was an abbreviation of her Russian surname, and in 1961 said something similar to The Saturday Evening Post. By the late 1990s, a number of followers believed that they had spotted the word “Rand” in a slightly altered version of the first six letters of the Cyrillic spelling of “Rosenbaum” and the word “Ayn” in the last three letters of the name. However, the visual evidence is flimsy, and Rand never claimed to have adapted “Ayn” from “Rosenbaum.”
The origin of “Ayn” may be more sentimental—and more ethnic—than the creator of a philosophy based on the self-made soul would be likely to admit. In the 1960s, a habitué of lectures on Randian Objectivism remembered asking her whether her father, like the woman’s own, had ever called his daughter by the pet name “Ayin.” Rand smiled and nodded yes, this admirer recalled. The woman explained that her own father had used “Ayin” as an affectionate Jewish diminutive meaning “bright eyes,” derived from the Hebrew word for “eye.” Adding substance to this theory is a letter from Anna Rosenbaum to Rand in the early 1930s, making fond reference to her eldest daughter’s childhood nickname “Ayinotchka”—a perfect Russian-inflected endearment for a little girl with bright, bold, hypnotizing eyes. If, in facing a new world, she adopted a childhood nickname that was a token of her father’s love, the choice is poignant. The derivation of the surname “Rand” remains a mystery.
In any case, with only two or three exceptions, she did not reveal her birth name to American acquaintances. Some friends and relatives ascribed this oddity to a concern about the barriers then confronting Jews in the United States, who were banned from certain neighborhoods, professions, social organizations, and clubs. Mimi Sutton, Rand’s niece by marriage,