Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

Their hopes soon were dashed. During the next three years, the Crimea changed hands four times. "It was like living on a battlefield," Alice later recalled. "Finally, we began to starve. Food was unobtainable. At last, we ate only millet. Except that Mother insisted on obtaining raw onions, which she fried in linseed oil; scurvy had become a terrible problem and Mother had read that onions prevented it." It was in this period that Anna Rosenbaum's jewelry, carefully hoarded against disaster, began to trickle away, replaced by almost useless rubles. The jewelry was not missed; there were no ballets at which to wear it, no elegant gowns, no gay, carefree parties; there was only drudgery, and fear, and worn, patched garments growing shabbier month by month.

In the misery of the Crimean years, an event of a personal nature occurred which was a significant source of happiness to Alice: her stem, remote father became her "intellectual ally." One day, under the White regime, it was announced that a political lecture was to be held; the lecturer was a well-known anti-Communist. Despite their straitened financial circumstances, Fronz Rosenbaum decided to allow himself the rare luxury of attending the lecture. When Alice announced that she wanted to go with him, he was so amazed by an interest he did not know she possessed, that, despite his conviction that children should take no interest in politics, he allowed her to join him. Alice later recalled that the lecture was interesting — but the conversation with her father afterwards was fascinating. Alice learned, for the first time, the extent of the intellectual sympathy between them in the realm of politics; she had known that he was opposed to communism; she had not known that he shared her belief in individualism. She had known that he was a thoughtful man; she had not known that he took ideas with a profound, respectful seriousness. And, for the first time, he was speaking to her as an adult; her ideas were to be taken seriously.

Years later, when Alice described her new relationship with her father, there was a soft smile on her face and a faint tremor in her voice. It was evident that at last, to her great happiness, she was receiving the sanction, the approval, of the man who had given her so little throughout her childhood. It was evident that she loved him — and that it was the first time in the fifteen years of her life that she had loved and been loved in return. And it was evident that the terms of that love were the only ones she knew, the only ones she respected and could understand: a philosophical mutuality.

It was during the Crimean years that Alice's relationship with her two sisters became closer. "My sisters were growing up and beginning to have personalities of their own, and the age distance lessened... I really loved my youngest sister." In Alice's view, she and Nora shared important values: "We liked the same books, she was developing exactly in my direction, and she wanted to be an artist, a painter. Our personalities were the same, and she was very intelligent." In We the Living, Alice would create — in Irina, a minor character — one of the most sympathetic women in all of her writings, an aspiring artist of great charm and courage whom she acknowledged was inspired by her memory of her little sister Nora. It is not surprising that in the description of Irina's drawings, one finds the gay, impudent spirit of Alice's tiddlywink music.

Alice felt that she had nothing in common with Natasha, her middle sister. "I would not have picked her as a friend, it was only a family affection. She was my exact opposite: she was not intellectual, and she was very 'feminine' — when the family was in rags, she was interested in her personal appearance; she was more interested in young men than I was, she had girlfriends in school, which neither I nor my little sister ever had, she was much more conventional. But she was enormously efficient; for instance, she wanted to be a pianist, and she practiced eight to ten hours a day — driving everybody and herself crazy. She had a marvelous technique but very little expression; she was strictly a virtuoso pianist. You can see in what way that would be different from me.

Alice entered high school ill the Crimea. In these early years of communism, the school was not yet ideologically controlled, even under the Red regimes. The teachers were old-fashioned, pro-Czarist ladies, who endured the rise of communism with grim resignation. For the first time, Alice became a class leader intellectually. Because she came from the sophisticated North, "I was forgiven for my intelligence." In Petrograd, the grim, desperately earnest little girl had been an outcast at school, by mutual, silent consent. She had shared no extracurricular activities with her schoolmates, and had made no friends among them. But in the Crimea "there was a tacit recognition of my superiority. I made no personal friends, I had no girlfriends, but I was recognized as the 'brain of the class,' which surprised me." On the first day of high school, a classmate approached Alice to ask for her help with her algebra homework. Alice explained the assignment, and what had to be done. The girl said that she had been given a different answer by a classmate. Alice replied, "Well, she's wrong. This is the right answer." "But the girl who gave me a different answer is our best student," Alice's classmate answered. Alice replied, "How do you know that 1 won't be?" The story spread instantly through the school that Alice had announced she would be the best student in the school — which she became. "And my answer to the assignment was the right one."

Alice's method of learning, a method that had seemed to her self-evident, but which she was now grasping was not self-evident to others, was to understand. Despite her remarkable memory, memory never was the tool she employed for learning. Her method was deduction: to grasp the stated or unstated axioms underlying a conclusion, to grasp the steps of moving from axiom to conclusion, to grasp the logical implications of the conclusion.

One incident at school, she later said, "influenced my thinking for life. One girl, a very nice, conscientious dummy, came to me because she could not understand her lesson, it dealt with a complex geometric problem. I explained it very thoroughly, I showed her all the connections. I realized she could not fill in the connections herself — I had to show her every step. The girl said, astonished, 'Why don't the teachers explain this the way you do?' I concluded that you can reach people's intelligence if you know how to present things clearly. I knew better than the teacher how to present things, and it was only an issue of logical progression and clarity. It gave me an enormous confidence in the common man, in the power of intelligence — some people were not as fast as I was, they could not connect by themselves, but people can be taught if it's explained properly. I still have that premise."

Alice never rejected "that premise." Throughout her life, she often said that the simplest of men, the least educated, had the power to grasp complex ideas if they were led through the necessary logical steps. It was a view that gave her infinite patience with minds slower and less competent than hers, so long as she believed that the mind was honest and seeking. Some of her friends of later years have commented that they observed her discussing politics, art, even metaphysics, for hours on end, with people she considered "the common man" — with a fifteen-year-old high school student, with her housekeeper, with her gardener — speaking in simple but philosophically accurate terms until her position was fully understood. She believed that such people had a capacity for logic, for understanding, an intellectual integrity uncorrupted by what she contemptuously called "modern education;" her patience and respect for the uncorrupted "common man" made her superbly able, in her personal dealings and through her writings, to reach him.