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FROM RUSSIA TO ROOSEVELT 15
Living under such dire circumstances, the Rosenbaums continued to
prize education and culture. Alisa, now a full-time university student,
was not asked to work. When her parents scraped together enough
money to pay her streetcar fare she pocketed the money and used it to
buy tickets to the theater. Musicals and operettas replaced fi ction as her
favorite narcotic.
At Petrograd State University Alisa was immune to the passions
of revolutionary politics, inured against any radicalism by the travails
her family was enduring. When she matriculated at age sixteen
the entire Soviet higher education system was in fl ux. The Bolsheviks
had liberalized admission policies and made tuition free, creating a
fl ood of new students, including women and Jews, whose entrance
had previously been restricted. Alisa was among the fi rst class of
women admitted to the university. Alongside these freedoms the
Bolsheviks dismissed counterrevolutionary professors, harassed those
who remained, and instituted Marxist courses on political economy
and historical materialism. Students and professors alike protested
the new conformity. In her fi rst year Alisa was particularly outspoken.
Then the purges began. Anticommunist professors and students
disappeared, never to be heard from again. Alisa herself was briefl y
expelled when all students of bourgeois background were dismissed
from the university. (The policy was later reversed and she returned.)
Acutely aware of the dangers she faced, Alisa became quiet and careful
with her words.
Alisa’s education was heavily colored by Marxism. In her later writing
she satirized the pabulum students were fed in books like The ABC
of Communism and The Spirit of the Collective. By the time she graduated
the school had been renamed Leningrad State University (and
Petrograd had become Leningrad). Like the city itself, the university
had fallen into disrepair. There were few textbooks or school supplies,
and lecture halls and professors’ offi ces were cold enough to freeze
ink. Ongoing reorganization and reform meant that departments
and graduation requirements were constantly changing. During her
three years at the university Alisa gravitated to smaller seminar-style
classes, skipping the large lectures that were heavy on Communist
ideology. Most of her coursework was in history, but she also enrolled
in classes in French, biology, history of worldviews, psychology, and
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