text: Life Early life Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, into a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg.She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna ().She was 12 when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted her family's lives.Her father's pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War.After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, Rand was among the first to enroll at Petrograd State University.At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history.She was one of many bourgeois students purged from the university shortly before graduating.After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many purged students, including Rand, were reinstated.She completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924.She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad.For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri; it became her first published work.By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn (pronounced ).In late 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago.She arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926.Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives learning English before leaving for Hollywood, California.In Hollywood, a chance meeting with director Cecil B.