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who came to know and love her in the 1930s and remained her friend until she died, recalled, “She didn’t want anyone to know that she was Jewish at first. No, she did not. There was a whole period, up until the [Second World] war, when she did not want that known.” Mimi, whose maiden name was Papurt, recalled Rand’s warning her not to reveal that her father’s clan had originated in the city of Berdychiv in the Ukraine. “That’s terrible, Mimi! That’s a Jewish ghetto!” the émigré told her. “She would introduce me as [her husband’s] niece,” said Mimi. “She didn’t use my last name.” Another relative who knew Rand less well, a great-granddaughter of Anna Rosenbaum’s cousin Anna Stone, explained that, in general, the extended family “was very secretive. They all changed their names.” The most important reason for Rand to have changed her name, this woman’s great-grandmother and other family members told her, was that “since she wanted to be a philosopher and have a best-selling book, she could not be a Jewish woman. People didn’t listen to Jewish women.” Although the novelist later said that her primary purpose had been to protect the Rosenbaums from any association with her public persona, for other reasons, discussed later, this explanation seems unlikely. Whatever the rationale, her reluctance to disclose these basic facts about her family of origin was so extreme that not a single one of her close friends or followers knew her real name when she died.

As Ayn Rand’s train moved west through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, she sat gazing at the wintry fields, dozing or practicing her English, perhaps by reading an American translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the first book she purchased in America. When the train pulled into the LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, her mother’s hospitable and hardworking cousins were on hand to welcome her. Practiced as they were at sponsoring sometimes disorientated Russian-Jewish “greenhorns,” as the family called new immigrants, the Portnoy women buzzed with ideas about what their cousin’s daughter might like to see and do. But they had never sponsored anyone quite as independent as Ayn Rand. She had her own agenda. She even persuaded them to let her see Ben Hur, a silent film about a captive charioteer who outwits his Roman captors, on her first day in Chicago. She liked it; she gave it a rating of four out of five in her journal.

She had been invited to stay with Anna and Mandel Stone, who were in the dress business. But after some difficulty about the family schedule, she moved in with Fern Brown’s parents, Minna and Sam Goldberg, who owned a small grocery store on Chicago’s North Side, near Lincoln Park, and lived in a neighboring five-room, ground-floor apartment. The parents slept in the front bedroom with their five-year-old son, Harvey. Harry Portnoy, the widowered husband of Anna Rosenbaum’s aunt Eva and the family patriarch, occupied a back alcove. Fern moved to the living-room couch, and Rand slept on Fern’s cot in the dining room. From the first, she focused on her near-term goal, which she half-jokingly referred to as “conquering Hollywood.” She stayed awake and worked at night, as she would periodically do for the rest of her life. She wrote or typed drafts of her screenplays, or movie scenarios—silent-film story lines that were relatively easy for her to compose because they didn’t require dialogue—at the dining-room table. She wrote these in Russian, and a Stone or a Lipton cousin translated them into English. In the middle of the night, she took breaks for long baths, young Harvey Portnoy recalled years later; but first she let the hot water run as long as possible, to kill any germs. Baths were a forgotten luxury in the Russia she had left behind, but cholera and typhoid fever, which thrive in filth, were all too common. The Goldberg family slept fitfully and woke bleary eyed. In the daytime, their guest walked around the apartment singing “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” at the top of her voice, in a Russian-accented contralto that substituted “z’s” for American