Spudboy100@aol.com Sat, 23 Oct 1999 04:08:42 EDT writes:
>Yah, I believe she changed her name because she was ashamed of her
>Jewish heritage.
>Since she was born in Mother Russia, so i'm
>guess'in that Alisha or some varient was her birth name and maybe
>not precisely the English, Alice. Where "Ayn" comes from I don't
>know.
According to _The Passion of Ayn Rand_ by Barbara Brandon, Alice Rosebaum changed her (first) name to Ayn when she disembarked to New York for the first time in the Winter 1926, when she was 21 years old. B. Brandon says that she took the name of a Finnish writer whose work she had not read, but whose name she liked. She wanted "everything to be new in her new world" (pp 63).
And according to the same bibliographic reference, Ayn Rosenbaum changed her last name with some help from the name of her Remington-Rand typewriter, not long afterwards, when she started to write. (pp. 71)
She never told her family in Russia the new name that she had chosen because she thought that she would one day be famous, and she feared that if she were known in Russia that she was Alice Rosenbaum, daughter of Fronz and Anna, her family's safety would be endangered (pp 71).
I really don't think that she made her name changes because she was ashamed of her heritage.
(Maybe someone else has already answered to this.. I'm actually not on this email list, I just look in the email archives sometimes.)
Amara
Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
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