Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success, August 6, 2024.

This biography traces the life of the prominent and divisive writer, Ayn Rand (1905–1982). Rand’s novels and nonfiction have sold 36 million copies and influenced three generations of Americans—a considerable achievement for a Russian Jewish immigrant who overcame obstacles to succeed in the majority culture on her terms.

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/2024-08-12/ty-article-magazine/.premium/a-rare-glimpse-into-the-jewishness-of-ayn-rand-the-u-s-rights-favorite-novelist/00000191-45a1-df16-a1d1-4fa7dd0d0000. 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).

Alessandra Wollner has interviewed me about Ayn Rand on the Jewish Lives Podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jewish-lives-podcast/id1476077177

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, March 2019

If Vasily Grossman’s 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905–1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman’s powerful anti-totalitarian works liken the Nazis’ crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art. Because Grossman’s major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. This biography illuminates Grossman’s life and legacy.

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019

Translated into Spanish and Ukrainian

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Audio Book Sample – Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

Blackstone Audio; the narrator — Stefan Rudnicki.

Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century: Q & A

This Q & A was compiled by the author herself.

Q. What prompted you to write Vasily Grossman’s biography?

A. If I had to answer in one sentence––Vasily Grossman’s subject matter. To use James Atlas’ words about Edmund Wilson, Grossman “offered a large canvas on which you could draw a map of the twentieth century––the ideal subject for a big, ‘definitive’ biography.” This line comes from Atlas’ memoir The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. In fact, Grossman’s novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows capture the twentieth century along with its calamities brought about by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes––World War II, the Holocaust, Ukraine’s famine, and the Gulag. Each of these topics may take a lifetime to explore, but I felt I could approach them through Grossman. As Atlas remarks, a biographer’s biggest reward is a chance to educate yourself while reconstructing someone else’s world.

Q. Writing a book is a marathon. What kept you going?

A. I had a sense of personal connection to Grossman’s themes. My birth family of Russian Jewry had suffered under Stalin and Hitler. My mother’s family––her uncle, aunt, and cousin––were liquidated during Stalin’s Great Purge. Her other uncle was shot as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Kiev. Earlier, while living in Kharkov and Kiev in the 1930s, my mother and grandmother witnessed Ukraine’s famine.

World War II is also not a remote event for my generation. My father had fought on the Eastern front; his brother and cousin were killed in battle. After the defeat of German fascism, Stalin launched his own anti-Semitic campaign, so my father, a war veteran, was, as a Jew, denied employment. In Life and Fate, commenting on postwar Soviet politics of state nationalism and antisemitism, Grossman writes that Stalin raised over the heads of Jews “the very sword of annihilation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler.”

I grew up in Moscow where Grossman spent much of his life. My parents and I lived in the apartment building where Grossman had a studio and kept part of his archive. Our house was among the addresses where in 1961 the KGB confiscated copies of Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate. My father, the novelist Grigory Baklanov (Friedman), brought his first fiction about the war to Grossman and later studied in his creative writing seminar. During Gorbachev’s glasnost my father became editor of Znamya literary magazine and published Grossman’s splendid Armenian memoir and short prose, and also published his wartime diaries as a separate volume.

Q. Vasily Grossman died in 1964. Why are his works relevant today?

A. Grossman wrote about state nationalism, the rise of totalitarianism, and antisemitism, topics that today remain among the most discussed. In Life and Fate the Nazi officer Liss says, “Nationalism is the soul of our epoch.” We are now witnessing the rise of nationalism in America, Europe, Russia, and China, and these words can be read as a warning from history.

In the 1950s both Grossman and Hannah Arendt elucidated on the nature of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. As Timothy Snyder points out in Bloodlands, “The Nazi and the Stalinist totalitarian systems must be compared, not so much to understand the one or the other but to understand our times and ourselves.” We are observing a strong comeback of far-right populist governments in Europe and elsewhere; in her award-winning book, The Future Is History, Masha Gessen even argues that totalitarianism has reclaimed Russia.

Because Grossman was a banned writer, his major works have only appeared after much delay. In the past two decades interest in his ideas has been steadily rising. Grossman’s novels are now recognized as a valuable historical source, a testimony about the twentieth century and the global evil perpetrated by totalitarian regimes. His powerful 1944 article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” became part of the evidence at Nuremberg. Today it continues to provide insights into the Holocaust, which Grossman was among the first to fathom and to chronicle.

Q. Martin Amis referred to Grossman as “a Soviet Tolstoy.” Do you agree with this description?

A. Yes and no. As a war novelist Grossman had undoubtedly experienced Tolstoy’s influence: his research notes for Life and Fate reveal that he used the structure of War and Peace as a blueprint. Written with epic sweep, Grossman’s novel also includes war parts and peace parts. Like Tolstoy, he depicts historical figures alongside fictional characters; his narrative switches between global events and family occurrences. Grossman, however, was not imitating Tolstoy. He was leading a dialogue with his predecessor and, as he states in his notes, intended to show “how life changed over 100 years.” Grossman’s protagonists fight in Stalingrad; are marched to a gas chamber, and, like the physicist Victor Shtrum, work on the Soviet nuclear program.

Actually, it was not merely Tolstoy’s greatness as a novelist that had inspired Grossman to model his epic Life and Fate on War and Peace. He saw in Tolstoy an example of a writer who was driven by the moral imperative to tell the truth. Having testified about Nazi crimes in Treblinka, he realized the pressing need to also make the world aware of the crimes of Stalinism.

In 1952, after three years’ battling with Soviet editors, Grossman succeeded in publishing a censored version of the novel For the Right Cause (this was the first part of Life and Fate). The initial reaction was positive: critics hailed it as “a Soviet War and Peace.” A few months later, For the Right Cause was attacked in the Soviet press and a political campaign against Grossman was launched, nearly ending in his arrest. Unlike Tolstoy, Grossman lived and wrote in a totalitarian state and many of his topics were the strictest Soviet taboos. In 1960 Grossman produced his uncompromising anti-totalitarian novel, Life and Fate. His attempt to publish it in the USSR was an act of desperate bravery and defiance.

Q. How will your book affect what we know about Grossman?

A. This book will come out 23 years after a single English-language biography by John and Carol Garrard. It’s drawn from my archival research, published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and interviews. My biography amasses the latest information about Grossman and his subject matter. I read everything Grossman had produced, including his early works, which were usually dismissed by biographers. My research helped me discover, for example, that Grossman’s beliefs in freedom and democracy were lifelong and that the Jewish theme was also conspicuous in his early works. My biography traces his life and ideas from the beginning, and I show how the war and the Shoah moved him to openly oppose the state.

I’ve always tried to unveil myths in my books, and this biography dispels a number of myths. Ehrenburg’s remark that Grossman was born under the star of misfortune has been given too much attention. Although there was tragedy in Grossman’s life, he was fortunate to survive Stalin’s mass purges and the war––despite reporting from Stalingrad and Kursk, the site of the largest tank battle in history. When discussing the confiscation of Life and Fate we need to know that this violent action was not unprecedented in the Soviet Union. The epilogue of my book tells the story of Georgy Demidov, a writer and Kolyma survivor, whose manuscripts were seized by the KGB and who was also deprived of the means to complete his testimony about the Gulag. In contrast, Grossman was able to produce his most uncompromising novel, Everything Flows, which became his political testament. One needs to remember that the list of Soviet literary martyrs is extraordinarily long. It includes writers murdered by the regime––Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pilnyak.

Q. It took you four years to produce this book. Any regrets?

A. It pains me to see the clichéd image on my book cover. This picture of Grossman, made in the burning Berlin in 1945, has been repeatedly published. I provided the publisher with a little known picture of Grossman in his study, but it was rejected “as not dramatic” enough. I believe a cover is important. It gives the first impression about the book. Regrettably, someone in the marketing department, who did not even read my book, decided the cover’s outcome.

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Tolstoy’s False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov, 2014

New York–London: Pegasus Books, November 2014

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ABOUT Tolstoy’s False Disciple

On the snowy morning of February 8, 1897, the Petersburg secret police were following Tolstoy’s every move. At sixty-nine, Russia’s most celebrated writer was being treated like a major criminal. Prominent Russians were always watched, but Tolstoy earned particular scrutiny. Over a decade earlier, when his advocacy on behalf of oppressed minorities angered the Orthodox Church and the Tsar, he was placed under permanent police surveillance.

Although Tolstoy was wearing his peasant garb, people on the streets had no trouble recognizing him from his portraits. He was often seen in the company of his chief disciple, Vladimir Chertkov. A man of striking appearance, twenty-five years younger, Chertkov commanded attention. His photographs with Tolstoy show him towering over the writer.

Close to the Tsars and to the chief of the secret police, Chertkov represented the very things Tolstoy had renounced ––class privilege, unlimited power, and wealth. Yet, Chertkov fascinated and attracted Tolstoy. He became the writer’s closest confidant, even reading his daily diary, and by the end of Tolstoy’s life, had established complete control over the writer and his legacy.

Tolstoy’s full exchange with Chertkov comprises more than 2,000 letters, making him the writer’s largest correspondent. The Russian archives have suppressed much of this communication as well as Chertkov’s papers for more than a century. The product of ground-breaking archival research, Tolstoy’s False Disciple promises to be a revelatory portrait of the two men and their three-decade-long clandestine relationship.

ABOUT THE WIVES

The women behind the greatest works of Russian literature:

Anna Dostoevsky, Sophia Tolstoy, Véra Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn were their husbands’ muses, intellectual companions, and indispensable advisers. These marriages were marked by intense collaboration: the women contributed ideas and committed to paper great works as stenographers, typists, editors, researchers, translators, and publishers. To use Vladimir Nabokov’s words, they formed a “single shadow” with the writers.

THE WIVES, 2012

The Wives, By Alexandra Popoff
New York–London: Pegasus Books
Translated into Portuguese (Brazil), Polish, and Serbian

Reviewed in Polish on YouTube:

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SOPHIA TOLSTOY: A BIOGRAPHY, 2010

Sophia Tolstoy: A biography by Alexandra Popoff

New York-Toronto: Free Press, 2010
Translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Turkish

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ABOUT SOPHIA TOLSTOY

This biography of Sophia Tolstoy tells the previously unknown story of a talented woman who was central to Leo Tolstoy’s life and creativity. Tolstoy’s wife of 48 years, Sophia was also his publisher, photographer, and biographer–– that on top of raising their 13 children. However, for a century after Tolstoy’s death she has been negatively portrayed.