July 1, 2024
An exploration of the Jewish roots of the infamously divisive author. Ayn Rand (1905-1982) had a profound influence on mid-20th-century America: Her two bestselling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, were outsize yet simplistic and lecturing novels about the virtues of capitalism and the evils of altruism in general and of communism in particular. Popoff, author of Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, attempts to pinpoint the origins of Rand's Manichean philosophy, which mainly relate to her upbringing in Petrograd, Russia. There, young Rand (born Alisa Rosenbaum) witnessed the violent triumph of the Bolsheviks, who dispossessed and purged Jewish families like hers. That experience, combined with heavy doses of Nietzsche, drove her toward an unapologetically selfish and achievement-focused philosophy. Her hardheadedness worked: When she arrived in America, she fast-talked her way into Hollywood, married to stay in the country, and wrote plays and novels that, however stiff, were perfect fits for a Cold War society paranoid about the spread of communism. Rand rejected her parents' faith--"The only time I'm Jewish is when I hear anti-Semitism," she once said--and Popoff notes how her distance from Judaism had consequences. She kept silent about the Holocaust and wrote an early novel, We the Living, that put her family at risk. However, faith still manifested in her work. She found common ground with conservative Jewish Hollywood studio heads, and Popoff notes how Fountainhead hero Howard Roark represented a "new Jew" strengthening the diaspora. Talking about matters of faith only goes so far with Rand, though, and the biography mainly serves as a speedy study of a woman who respected no scripture but her own: Asked by noted Random House editor Bennett Cerf to cut Atlas Shrugged, a contemptuous Rand replied, "Would you cut the Bible?" An unsentimental introduction to a contentious, often exasperating literary figure.
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