Leonard Peikoff

Born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in Tsarist Russia, Ayn Rand was surrounded by pogroms aimed at the Jewish and anti- semitism increased after the assassination of Tzar Alexander II in 1881. There were two younger sisters in her family: Natalia, known as Natasha, and Elanora, known as Nora. Her mother was Anna Borisovna née Kaplan and they had a mutual dislike of each other as Rand thought she was a social climbing, unprincipled conformist and Borisovna thought her daughter did…