Is Ayn Rand her real name?
‘Ayn Rand’ is not her birth name, but it is the name she used most of her life. She adopted that name when she left the Soviet Union. Rand’s Russian birth name can be transliterated into English as ‘Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum.’ (The first name is also sometimes transliterated as ‘Alissa’ or ‘Alyssa,’ or translated into ‘Alice.’)[*] In a letter to a fan, Rand wrote that “‘Ayn’ is both a real name and an invention. The original of it is a Finnish feminine name.” This Finnish name is pronounced in Russian as “I-na” and would be written as ‘Aino’ in English. Rand shortened this to the single syllable ‘Ayn’.[*] How she came to choose ‘Rand’ as a last name is less clear, partly because of the many contradictory speculations about it: • Barbara Branden repeats a story from a cousin of Rand’s, who claimed that Rand took the name from a Remington-Rand typewriter while living with relatives in Chicago in 1926. Although widely repeated, this story contains an impossible anachronism: Remington Typ
