Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

The Rosenbaum family lived in a large, comfortable apartment overlooking one of the great squares of St. Petersburg. Beneath the apartment, on the ground floor, was the chemist shop owned by Alice's father. Fronz Rosenbaum was of slightly more than medium height, stocky and dark-haired, a silent, grim-faced man of severe integrity. His greatest pride lay in the fact that he was a rarity in Russia: a self-made man. His family had been poor, he had struggled to support himself through university, and, when he began to achieve success as a chemist, he had supported six sisters and a brother when their time came to enter the university. He had not wanted to become a chemist, but there were few universities that Jews could attend, and even those had strict quotas; when there was an opening for a Jew in the department of chemistry, he had snatched at the opportunity to enter a profession. He was a serious man whom Alice never knew to have a close personal friend; in his leisure time, he enjoyed reading the works of social criticism which were becoming popular in Russia, works by writers who defended European civilization and the British political system as against the mysticism and political absolutism of Russia. Weekends, when relatives visited, he spent hours in solemn games of whist.

"He had firm convictions," Alice later was to say, "but you'd never know it, because he was mostly silent, and argued very little. Mother argued politics, but Father never did. He seemed uninterested in intellectual issues, but I sensed even as a child that he took ideas much more seriously than Mother. He once told me that what he would have wanted was to be a writer; he considered ideas and the spread of ideas the most important thing of all. It was only after the Communist revolution that he began to discuss political ideas with Mother and other adults, and it was then that I could form some idea of his moral code and convictions about life in general. His strongest issue was individualism; he was committed to reason, but unfortunately not by stated conviction; he was non-religious, although he never objected to Mother's religious ideas — he expressed the idea: 'Well, one never can tell.'

"I felt a friendly respect for him in childhood, not a strong affection, a dutiful 'official' affection — although probably even then I loved him more than I loved Mother. I liked him as a person, but in childhood I had very little to do with him. Children's education was totally in the hands of the mother in those days. Father never interfered, so he exercised no influence. It was when he and I began discussing ideas when I was fourteen, when we became political allies, that I felt a real love, a love that meant something."

Alice's mother was the opposite of her father. A graceful, pretty woman with sparkling, intense eyes, Anna Rosenbaum seemed always to be rushing about the apartment, giving orders to cook, maid, nurse, and governess; organizing, the formal banquets she loved to give; arranging for a pianist to entertain; reveling in the role of intellectual hostess among the lawyers, doctors, and other professional people who attended her lively parties. When she was not entertaining, she read the French literary magazines that were scattered about the apartment, or rushed off to lectures, to the theater, to the ballet.

All during Alice's childhood, her relationship with her mother had the quality of a pitched battle. "I disliked her quite a lot. We really didn't get along. She was my exact opposite, and I thought so in childhood, and now," said Alice years later. "She was by principle and basic style, by sense of life, extremely social. She was not really interested in ideas, she was much more interested in the social aspect. Our clashes in childhood were that I was antisocial, I was insufficiently interested in other children, I didn't play with them, I didn't have girlfriends; this was a nagging refrain always. She disapproved of me in every respect except one: she was proud of my intelligence and proud to show me off to the rest of the family."

Her father's seeming indifference to her and her mother's disapproval had to be sources of anguish to the child. Yet as an adult she always spoke as if they were simple facts of reality, of no emotional significance to her then or later. One can only conclude that a process of self-protective emotional repression — which was so clearly to characterize her adult years — was becoming deeply rooted even in early childhood.

In Alice's later writings, her contempt for the "social" was to be a constantly recurring theme. Lillian Rearden, the major woman villain in Atlas Shrugged, is characterized as someone whose emptiness of spirit is exemplified by her passion for social interaction, for parties, for being the center of a crowd of people. As she characterized Anna Rosenbaum in her discussions, so Ayn Rand characterized Lillian Rearden: the "intellectual hostess" fundamentally indifferent to the world of ideas. To the end of her life, for Alice to say of someone that he or she had a deep need for the company of other people was to dismiss that person as essentially without value.

An equal source of conflict with her mother was Alice's loathing of physical activity. Anna Rosenbaum believed that it was necessary, for health reasons, that children have fresh air every day, whatever the weather. St. Petersburg's winters were freezing; darkness fell early in the afternoon and lasted until the middle of the following morning, with icy winds and whirling snowstorms and a Neva hard as steel. Alice detested the long walks she was forced to take in the snow and sleet. When expensive gymnastic equipment was purchased for her, she refused to go near it. "Make movements, Alice," was her mother's constant angry refrain. The child — and the woman she was to become — never willingly "made movements;" she was sedentary to the point of endangering her health. Even in the final years of her life, when a minimum of physical activity was recommended to her for medical reasons, she angrily refused any form of exercise-as if still defying the mother who demanded that she engage in activities that bored her.

The Rosenbaum household was a chaotic one, alive with Anna’s comings and goings, with visiting friends, with relatives. An uncle and aunt of Alice’s lived in the same apartment building, and Alice’s first companion was little Nina, her cousin, a year and a half older than she. Alice's uncles appear to have been responsible for the family's partial protection from the anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia; one or more of them, an American cousin of Anna Rosenbaum's recalled, carried on the family tradition of being bootmaker to the army.

In the Rosenbaum home, religion had little meaning or place. Although Anna was religious — in what Alice was to term an "emotional-traditional way, not out of conviction, more out of devotion to the religion of her own mother" — she gave her children no religious training. The family perfunctorily observed one or two holy days a year — lighting candles and serving specified foods — then gradually gave up any formal observance. Alice had not enjoyed the observances, and did not miss them. Nor did she appear to recall ever hearing the problems of anti-Semitism, raging throughout Russia, discussed in her home — although her parents must have been painfully aware of pogroms and the frighteningly ubiquitous hatred of Jews. Alice was never to deny that she was Jewish; in later years, as a committed atheist, she would say "I was born Jewish;" but it had no significance to her, she had no emotional tie or sense of identification with Jews or things Jewish. 3

One of Alice's earliest memories was of her fascination with the great city in which she lived. Still a toddler, she sat on the windowsill of her apartment, her father beside her, looking out into the winter street at one of the first streetcars to appear in St. Petersburg. It was evening, and she gazed in wonderment at the blinking yellow and red lights of the streetcar, as her father explained their purpose. Perhaps this was the beginning of the love of technology, of what she later was to call the physical manifestations of the power of man's mind, that she would carry with her as a banner — as a proud crusade — throughout all the years of her life.