Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [7]
She also collected popular postcards of famous Western paintings that were sold in dry-goods stores. But she chose only the ones with human forms; she wouldn’t touch the landscapes or the still lifes. Some of these postcards were found after her death, along with newspaper clippings and sketches of clothes she liked, in a file folder marked “Pictures I Like.” “I always collected things,” she said, adding that her mother regularly complained about how much rubbish she acquired. Happily, her grandmother Kaplan “retaliated” against her mother’s complaints by buying Rand a chest of drawers in which to store her collections.
The great exception in her somewhat alienated childhood affections was her handsome father, Zinovy, known to the family as Z.Z. and to Rand as Zakharovich. Presenting him as Kira’s Uncle Vasili in We the Living, Rand noted his “thick hair, powerful body, [and] sunken eyes[,] like a fireplace of blazing coals.” Like Vasili, Zinovy was, for the most part, silent, but he was immensely proud of his accomplishments as a self-made businessman. He admired his eldest daughter’s proud spirit and original, razor-sharp mind. An avid reader of Russian literature, he encouraged her efforts to write her first stories and, later, her drive to craft a fiction of ideas.
Zinovy had once wanted to be a writer, too, but took the more practical, if difficult, route of getting a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Warsaw in 1899. Warsaw, 120 miles east of Zinovy’s hometown of Brest-Litovsk in the Russian Pale, was popular with the Jewish residents of the region because it had a relatively lenient admissions policy for Jews. Since non-Christians couldn’t matriculate but were confined to being “listeners,” or auditors, however, Zinovy’s degree was a two-year certificate rather than a baccalaureate. Rand believed that he had chosen the field of chemistry because there had been an opening in that department for a Jew. Since he didn’t begin his course of study until age twenty-seven, it seems likely that his parents couldn’t afford to pay his tuition and that he worked and saved for years to pay his own way. Later, Rand recalled, he helped all but one of his eight brothers and sisters to get training in the medical trades and leave the Pale. Those who moved to St. Petersburg became physician’s assistants, dentists, midwives, and masseurs.
Zinovy’s father’s extended family were tradesmen and professionals in Brest. Exactly how his parents earned their living is not known, but they were probably medical practitioners, too, since, like Zinovy and his siblings, Zinovy’s paternal uncle Aron Rosenbaum and a number of Aron’s children were physicians, midwives, pharmacists, and dentists in and around Brest and in St. Petersburg. Anna’s family originally came from Brest, too, and dozens of her Kaplan relatives remained behind there. Factory owners, community leaders, and tradesmen, some lived or worked on the same streets where Rosenbaums lived and worked and would certainly have known and been known to Zinovy’s parents. Indeed, it is possible that Anna and Zinovy were engaged to be married before Zinovy reached St. Petersburg—that is, that Rand’s parents’ marriage was arranged. One clue: On Zinovy’s arrival in St. Petersburg in 1902, he immediately took a managerial job with Anna’s sister Dobrulia Konheim and her husband, Iezekiil. That a newly licensed pharmacist was hired not as an apprentice or assistant but as a manager suggests that his position was preferential and prearranged.
In any case, up to the years of the revolution, Anna and Zinovy’s marriage was peaceable and conventional rather than ardent. He worked long hours and didn’t spend much time in the apartment; she managed the girls’ social activities, education, health regimens, and religious training until they entered school at eight or nine—since, like most boys and girls from the Russian middle and upper classes, the Rosenbaum