Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [8]
Rand’s first conscious memory of experimenting with the idea of God took place at age six, she recalled, when she and a maternal cousin decided to pray for a little white kitten belonging to their grandmother Kaplan. The kitten was sick and dying, and Rand’s cousin proposed that if they “prayed sincerely” God would hear their prayers and save the kitten. They retreated to a corner of the room and prayed, but the kitten died, and though Rand still halfheartedly believed in God, she wasn’t surprised by the ineffectuality of prayer; she hadn’t really believed that it would work, she said. Later, in the terrifying year of 1918, she must often have heard the kind of fatalistic Russian Orthodox talk of God’s will and the necessity to follow Christ’s example of suffering that would infuriate her all her life. She decided to cast her lot with man—that is, with her own observations and sense of entitlement and justice—rather than with an oppressive, inscrutable, unjust, and alien deity.
Although her parents tried to protect her from the political and ethnic strife all around her during childhood, they could hardly have been successful. From the age of five or six, Ayn Rand took everything in, including the ugly and nonsensical pieties and prejudices of neighbors and official spokesmen who treated Jews as, at best, second-class human beings. Often, their pretext for such treatment was that the Jews were the greedy entrepreneurs, rabid industrialists, and ruthless bankers who were spoiling Russia’s “pure” Slavic traditions and fomenting labor unrest. In such circumstances, Rand’s love for her self-made father was strongly roused. The results would be seen in her pro-individualist, proindustrial novels, which more than one commentator has also viewed as an impassioned defense of gifted, productive Jews.
Rand received attention and praise from her family and later, from her teachers and classmates, primarily, if not only, for being a startlingly intelligent child. (Judging by her lightning-quick logic and depth of insight as an adult, she must have been frighteningly intelligent, observed Rand acquaintance Robert Bidinotto.) Yet her actual ideas and feelings were of little interest to anyone, including her extended family, except her youngest sister, Nora. The household was busy with her father’s growing business and her mother’s and middle sister’s comings and goings, and the women, especially, had little patience with Rand’s odd musings. In her first novel, We the Living, she writes that Kira’s family “shrugged impatiently at what they called Kira’s feelings. … They were not feelings to [Kira’s sister Lydia] but only Kira’s feelings [italics added].” When Rand entered school, the same was true of her classmates. The intensely thoughtful child was not only solitary, but she was also awkward and offbeat. She remembered being aware that her extreme shyness and violent intensity put people off, but she was sure that such social awkwardness was merely a technical fault and that other people were wrong not to understand and appreciate her. She was selfconsciously different from others, as if by choice. But she was painfully lonely.
Little Nora trailed after her eldest sister, providing a worshipful chorus for Rand’s enthusiasms and dislikes. Because they favored the same books and pictures, Rand thought Nora was like her, with an almost identical natural bravery, sensibility, and style. In this, she mistook Nora’s imitation of her for the girl’s authentic inner self. Eighty years later, the sister would