Alexandra Popoff's Blog - Posts Tagged "ayn-rand"

Rich Tenorio, a reporter for Haaretz, sent me these questions and later published an article using some of my answers: https://www.haaretz.com/life/2024-08-.... Here I’m including the Q & A in full.

Q. How did you get the idea to write this book?

In 2019, when I was commissioned to write this biography, I knew little about Ayn Rand – except that she was a divisive writer who prized capitalism. I’m not afraid of controversial topics and, besides, I was glad to be approached by Jewish Lives.

Q. How did you research the project, and how long did it take?

First, I read several major biographies of Rand, including those by Jennifer Burns, Anne Heller, and Barbara Branden. In early 2020, during the pandemic, the Ayn Rand Archives in California gave me permission to research Rand’s papers remotely. (Anne Heller, who produced Rand’s full-length biography, was denied access to these archives.) Jennifer Burns’ excellent biography of Rand focuses on her political philosophy.

I completed the book in 2022, so it took me 3 years to research and to write it.

So, what’s new? The Archives hold a large cache of Russian letters to Rand, written by her immediate and extended families. I closely examined the originals comprising hundreds of handwritten pages dated from 1926 to the 1940s. These letters are important to understanding Rand’s background and influences on her work. I also received permission from John Hospers’ estate to use his letters to Rand that discuss her philosophy.

Of course, my perspective is different: unlike previous biographers, I grew up in Soviet Russia. My Jewish family had lived through experiences similar to Rand’s birth family. I examined the influences of Rand’s formative years in Russia on her life and work.

Q. To what extent has Rand's Jewish background and/or identity been explored in previous works about her life? To what extent does your book represent a different approach? Are there any new findings about her Jewishness?

I view Rand’s ambition and achievement as typical of East-European Jewry who immigrated to America in the twentieth century (hence the epigraph in my book from Neal Gabler).

Anne Heller’s book provides some insights into Rand’s Jewishness. But because Heller was denied access to Rand’s Archives she had to rely on Barbara Branden’s biography and Rand’s apocryphal stories about her early years.

Rand grew up in a practicing Jewish family in St. Petersburg, with a Yiddish speaking grandfather. As apparent from the family letters, she knew some Yiddish. Her mother, aunts, uncles, cousins on her mother’s side were practicing Jews; her father – less so. Although Rand later rejected her faith and pronounced herself an atheist, she could not be fully free from these early influences.
Rand consulted her birth family during her work on We the Living. Ideas from her father’s letters, which I translated and quoted, are reflected in The Fountainhead. Such is the idea that “masses of mediocrities” create impediments to genuine talent. Her father’s idea that “exceptionally gifted individuals” become “prime movers” in philosophy, science, and art impacted her views.

I also examined Rand’s interest in Nietzsche from a Jewish perspective. Nietzsche‘s philosophy (anti-traditionalism and affirmation of freedom of individual choice) had appealed to early twentieth-century European Zionists, including Chaim Weizmann.

Previous biographers believed that Rand did not explore Jewish themes. Unlike others, I show that she subverted some of the most persistent Jewish stereotypes, such as moneylenders and financiers.

As we know, secular Jews prevail among the Objectivists. Rand’s major followers, “class ’43,” were descendants of East-European Jewish immigrants. They first united around The Fountainhead, which contains issues important to Jews, such as – striving for success and achieving it by overcoming all obstacles.

Q. How much of Rand's thinking was shaped by her early years in tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union? To what extent did she use her screenwriting and authorial talents to address what she saw as the evils of communism?

Rand was never free from her experiences of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing civil war, which left millions dead through fighting, famine, and epidemics. She saw a total collapse of moral values; the evil coming from both the Bolsheviks and the Whites who opposed them. She would inevitably experience anti-Jewish hatred that always climaxed in troubled times. These early impressions explain her extreme and unyielding vision, her Manichean view of the world.

She also lived through the onset of Soviet authoritarianism and Stalinism that placed zero value on individual human life.

Rand’s anti-communism was boosted during the Great Depression when thousands of Americans headed to the “workers’ paradise.” During the “Red Decade” she worked to expose Soviet realities in her scenario Red Pawn and first novel We the Living. With this novel she was hoping to get Russia out of her system.

Instead, her absolute rejection of communism became the driving force behind everything she later wrote. It led her to renounce altruism; to use her words, “Until the morality of altruism is blasted out of people’s minds, nothing will save us from Communism.”

Q. Can you discuss to what extent antisemitism motivated Rand to speak up about her Jewish background and identity?

Rand had said that she only felt Jewish when faced with anti-Semitism. But even then, it was a struggle to identify herself as a Jew. Here is a story that, as far as I know, appears in my book for the first time. In the 1960s Rand resigned as a speaker for WBAI-FM radio station. She explained her resignation in an unsent letter: “The specific reason is that WBAI permitted an obscene anti-Semitic ‘poem’ calling for the killing of Jews, and an obscene utterance, praising Hitler’s atrocities, to be broadcast over its facilities.” From the agonized drafts of this letter I gathered that anti-Semitism concerned her deeply and that her ethnicity mattered to her even as she said it didn’t.

Q. How sympathetic a figure did you find Rand to write about? How eager were people to speak about her?

Rand is not a sympathetic character. Highly ambitious, single-minded, goal-oriented people rarely are. Her persuasiveness and energy drew followers to her. Later her fame and love of controversy made her the subject of many biographies.

Q. Can you discuss the impact of Rand's works and views today, including with regard to presidential politics this year?

Rand’s Manichean view of the world, her rejection of the middle road and compromise, well describe our contemporary scene—not only in presidential politics. Rand advocated moral absolutes, and that’s what we have today: the mentality of good versus evil. Each political party has its own uncompromising vision of what’s good.

The traditional bipartisan approach to solving problems has been replaced by confrontational argument. Were Rand alive today she might very well have enjoyed this approach.

Q. Can you discuss your own background and how much any of Rand’s background resonated with yours?

Like Rand, I feel Jewish when faced with anti-Semitism. I fully relate to her anti-communism, but not to her rejection of altruism, which I think is apparent from my book.

I grew up in the family of Russian secular Jews. My paternal great-grandfather, Iosel’ Gertz Kantor, was a merchant who had arrived in Russia from Lithuania. Before WWI he received permission to open a business in St. Petersburg. This was a time when only “privileged” Jews—wealthy merchants and those with “useful” professions (like Rand’s grandfather Berko Kaplan, a skillful tailor) were allowed to settle in the Imperial capital.

My paternal grandfather, Yakov Friedman, was a Jewish trader, who in the 1920s, during the New Economic Policy (NEP) established by Lenin, opened a business in Voronezh. When Stalin later cracked down on the NEP, my grandfather’s business was expropriated and he was exiled to Kurgan, Siberia, along with his family. This is where my father spent his early childhood. Rand’s father’s business was expropriated after the Bolshevik Revolution, which gave her a taste of what Communism was about. Her novel We the Living depicts the years of the NEP that she witnessed while in Russia.

Q. Is there anything I have not brought up that you would like to mention?

I think you covered the major issues.
Since you asked about my background, here is a bit more information. My late father, Grigory Baklanov (his real name – Grigory Friedman), was a Russian Jewish novelist and participant in WWII. His novels were translated into 36 languages and have appeared in English (e.g., Forever Nineteen, translated by Antonina Bouis).

Booklisti.com has published my recommendations for five literary biographies.

Here is the link:
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This is my response to Gary Morson’s critique of my biography Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success. My letter appeared in the 2025 winter issue of Jewish Review of Books, under the title “Life and Capital”.

An amusing quote attributed to Reverend Sydney Smith and later appropriated by Oscar Wilde says: “I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.”

This fully applies to Gary Morson’s review of my biography of Ayn Rand, published by Jewish Lives. Morson is captivated by an article of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, “Ayn Rand: Engineer of Souls” –– a discussion of the 2009 biography of Rand by Anne Heller. It’s Daniels’ article, rather than my book, that has provided major arguments for Morson’s piece “Atlas Schlepped,” in the previous issue of JRB.

Among the most divisive American writers, Rand had inspired her critics’ polarizing views. My goal was to write about her without preconceptions, while examining Jewish influences on her life and prose. Unlike Anne Heller, I received access to the Ayn Rand Archives in California. I’m the only biographer to have studied a large cache of Russian letters from Rand’s birth family to her in America, beginning in 1926. I wrote of her traditional family (Rand knew some Yiddish); her Jewish friends and milieus. Rand did not describe herself as a Jew and married a lapsed Catholic, but felt more comfortable with ethnic Jews. Her major followers in New York, the circle of Objectivists, were descendants of East-European Jewry, as was her lover Nathan Blumenthal (Branden).

Morson reiterates the argument made by Daniels that Rand’s literature and thought belong to the Russian rather than American tradition. Like Daniels, he divides Russian nineteenth-century writers into two opposing camps: the greats, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky –– on one side, and angry revolutionary radicals, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky whose socialist utopian novel What Is to Be Done? influenced Lenin –– on the other.

Whereas the radicals expressed their views with total certainty, the great writers embraced nuance and complexity. This is a faulty theory, for both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were drawn to extremes. Tolstoy, during his religious phase, was intolerant and dogmatic, and had renounced all social institutions. If the world was built on his moral principles there would be anarchy. Dostoevsky was virulently anti-Semitic. In his “Notebooks” (I’ll quote from David Goldstein’s Dostoevsky and the Jews) he wrote: “The Yid and his bank are now reigning over everything: over Europe, education, civilization, socialism—especially socialism, for he will use it to uproot Christianity and destroy its civilization.” Anti-Semitic poison even penetrated his best fiction.

According to Morson, all Russian radicals admired Chernyshevsky’s tendentious novel, whereas the great writers despised it. Rand, by virtue of being a radical, falls into the first category: “Anyone who knows Chernyshevsky’s book will recognize its enormous influence … on Rand’s fiction.” I grew up in the Soviet Union where this abominable novel was mandatory reading, but fail to see similarities. True, both were bad stylists and moralists, but not every author of stilted prose owes it to Chernyshevsky. There is no proof that Rand read it. If she had, she would have despised the socialist writer rather than imitate him. But Chernyshevky is still rescued from obscurity by Western professors: Derek Offord in his short book Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia mentions him eighty-four times.

“Rand’s fiction,” writes Morson, “closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism.” In fact, Rand’s novels (with the exception of Atlas Shrugged, which can be ironically described as “capitalist realism”) were influenced by the works of Soviet ideological enemies –– Nietzsche and Evgeny Zamyatin (his dystopian novel We), and, as apparent from her novel Anthem, also by the Torah.

Rand, whose family was dispossessed by the Bolsheviks, witnessed the 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War, with its violence and hunger. These experiences determined her Manichean view of the world. She was not in the habit of reading Chernyshevsky or Lenin. Regardless, Morson proceeds to quote passages from Lenin matching them with quotations from Rand’s prose to reveal that both have demeaned their political opponents. He doesn’t hide his contempt for the writer when referring to “Rand and her Soviet counterparts.” Unlike Daniels, who discusses both Rand’s virtues and vices, Morson focuses on the vices alone, presenting her as a hopeless writer and shallow thinker. This fails to explain her broad appeal in America. Rand’s political philosophy, best analyzed in Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market, was influential among the American right; her moral philosophy, written in late life, was indeed murky and dogmatic. Her major novels were endorsed by the Austrian Jewish economist Ludwig von Mises, who believed that Atlas Shrugged contains “a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society.”

When Morson turns to my biography, he deals offhandedly with my text: “As Popoff observes, [Rand] attributed all doubt to wickedness, much as Lenin deemed it counterrevolutionary.” I checked my book –– I didn’t write this. Rand “never wrote about Jews,” Morson insists; he proceeds to say that her characters have Russian or American names. Rand’s first novels appeared during the interwar period and the peak of anti-Semitism in America when Jewish studios in Hollywood also avoided using Jewish names and portrayals –– although films were made by Jews. But a number of Rand’s characters had Jewish prototypes.

Rand’s novel We the Living captures her experiences under the Bolsheviks. I wrote that “the Jewish theme of choosing life is most perceptible in this novel.” Morson comments: “It is true that the book of Deuteronomy advises its readers to ‘choose life,’ but it is doubtful that Rand knew that…” If she referred to the book of Genesis and the book of Ruth in her prose, how would she miss the book of Deuteronomy? Speaking of the Jewish tradition in The World as I See It, Einstein observed: “Life is sacred — that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.” This major value is emphasized in Atlas Shrugged where Rand advocates “a single choice: to live.”

As a lecturer Rand kept her audiences spellbound. Her 1961 talk “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” defends her cause of laissez-fare capitalism and makes an explicit reference to Jews. American businessmen, she maintained, are a small and productive minority who hold the economy on their shoulders, but who nonetheless, have to function under especially restrictive laws. Like the bourgeoisie in Soviet Russia or the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, they are penalized exclusively for their virtues. According to Morson, there are no Jewish themes in this passage, either.

Morson writes: “Popoff detects Jewishness in Rand’s support of capitalism (and her dollar sign jewellery)…” Here is what I wrote: “For a Jew to endorse wealth in defiance of the stereotype of ‘selfish greed’ manifested chutzpah.”

In Morson’s view, it would be better if Rand’s Jewish background remained hidden. Here’s his rationale: “The less this terrible author of lifeless prose and repellent ideas owes to Judaism, the better.” Rand was an atheist, and I have not written about Judaism. In the end he proposes to “assign” Rand “to the Russian tradition, which features so many repellent thinkers…” One’s identity cannot be assigned or reassigned: Rand said she felt Jewish when faced with anti-Semitism; she also supported Israel.