From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sun Oct 24 1999 - 02:56:04 MDT
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.
Do you have a reference ?
>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
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Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
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"Trust in the Universe, but tie up your camels first."
(adaptation of a Sufi proverb)
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