Chapter 24 reconstructs the writers’ encounter with Dr. Nahum Kavinoky, the president of the American-Russian Institute of Southern California. The meeting seems to have prompted Ilf, at least, to consider the multiple identities of the pair’s Jewish immigrant interlocutors. Kavinoky was a complex figure, a man born in the Pale of Jewish settlement, whose family history included both revolutionary radicalism and immigrant striving. He presided over a Soviet-affiliated friendship organization, was fluent in both Russian and English, and nurtured family ties to the Russian intelligentsia (through his daughter Galina Katanyan) and the Comintern (through his father-in-law Boris Reinstein, a Jewish return immigrant to the Soviet Union). The encounter in Pasadena suggested that powerful emotional bonds and cultural yearnings intensified, even underpinned, friendship with the Soviet Union.

Chapter 11 documents Ilf and Petrov’s family ties to America. The pair visited Ilf’s uncles in Hartford, Connecticut, and saw Petrov’s brother’s play, Squaring the Circle, on Broadway. They detailed neither of these adventures in the published travelogue. But again, as with the complex hybrids, the contacts shed light on the process of cultural exchange. Seeing Ilf’s Jewish Russian American relatives in Hartford and an American production of Valentin Kataev’s popular Soviet farce on Broadway allowed Ilf and Petrov to reflect on the possibility of bridging divides and to grapple with the most difficult kind of cultural understanding: getting one another’s jokes.

Chapter 7 details the American novelist John Dos Passos’s interactions with the Soviet authors as a guide, writer of letters of introduction, and literary model. At the time of their visit, Dos Passos was at the center of an important literary debate on the recently articulated socialist realism. By the time they returned, Soviet cultural authorities had turned decisively against Dos Passos’s so-called formalism. Excised from the 1937 Russian edition of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, Dos Passos nonetheless profoundly influenced their account. The Dos Passos connection allows us to understand the genre-defying Odnoetazhnaia Amerika as not only a travelogue, a satire, and picaresque but also as a valedictory intervention in the debate on the possibility of socialist realism with a modernist sensibility.

Chapter 16 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s visit to the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It argues that their encounter with the Lab’s exhibits and its assistant director Kenneth Chapman did not generate new knowledge. Rather, it affirmed their assumptions about both capitalism and American Indians. Even without understanding the Lab’s current financial crisis, they highlighted the irrationality of having a Rockefeller, rather than the state, support scientific institutions. The Laboratory’s exhibits, and perhaps Chapman’s explanation of them, offered confirmation of their view of American Indians as romantic relics.

Chapter 9 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s adventures in Black New York, which they largely omitted from their published work. Soviet antiracism offered little guidance when it came to understanding or recounting the unsettling intersections of gender, sexuality, pleasure, and race the writers encountered at a Harlem nightclub or the unexpected meeting with a Russian-speaking African American singer in the cast of "Porgy and Bess." To the extent that Ilf and Petrov told the story of Black New York at all, they relied on a “romantic racialization” of African Americans as naturally spiritual and musical.

This chapter analyses the reciprocal connection and economic co-dependence between the city and its hinterland through patterns of property ownership among the different Jerusalemite institutions. It shows that the extra-urban activities of these institutions directly continued the mechanisms and strategies established earlier in their intra-urban engagement. Thus, for example, in the case of the Holy Sepulchre this included the establishment of close working relationships with local settlers, direct management of rural estates and the reallocation of previously acquired assets in accordance with the Holy Sepulchre’s changing economic needs. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to highlight the different interests that shaped patterns of property ownership outside the city and trace the shifts that occurred after the middle of the twelfth century, as well as their correspondence with the development of Jerusalemite institutions.

Chapter 20 analyzes “The Desert” installment of Ilf and Petrov’s photo essay. It argues that their rushed tour of natural wonders produced a fundamental insight: In contrast to Soviet technical marvels, always represented as heroic prospects or the fruits of epic battles with nature, the American scenic road was a mundane marvel that conquered space and time with nothing more spectacular than regular road maintenance, cheap motels, plentiful gas stations, and accurate signage. Like the scenic road itself, the photo essay is full of contrasts and contradictions: the sublime beauty of the desert, smooth highways, and unsightly “oases.” To draw out these contrasts, Ilf and Petrov relied on the ironic back and forth between texts and images. Like a good sidekick, Ilf’s photos fed the writers’ deadpan observations that occasioned all manner of ironic, critical, and whimsical rejoinders.

The four chapters in Part I examine the assumptions, regulations, exceptions, compromises, and workarounds that shaped whether and how Soviet visitors made it into the United States. They address the overarching questions of why, despite deep mutual suspicions that persisted even after the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1933, Soviet citizens came to the United States and why the US government let them come.

In their published work, Ilf and Petrov equated low culture – trashy movies, wrestling, burlesque – with American culture. At the other end of the spectrum, they endeavored to show that American high culture consisted entirely of high-priced European imports that wealthy patrons appreciated only as luxury commodities, not art. Nothing, Ilf and Petrov emphasized, could be further from the situation in the Soviet Union, where the state-supported opera houses and concert halls made high culture available to all. Recovering the encounters with middlebrow culture that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue largely ignored, Chapter 12 argues that Soviet and American cultural producers shared some of the same aims and challenges – even as they operated under different constraints.

Chapter 23 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s representatives of what they considered the American “radical intelligentsia." To emphasize the radicals’ status as Americans, the writers scrubbed them of all complicating ethnic, national, or racial markers and elided their connections to the Soviet Union. Devoting a largely admiring passage to Alexander Kaun, a Berkeley professor, Ilf and Petrov neglected to mention that he was an immigrant. They also emphasized that the radical professor no less than the radical journalists Lincoln Steffens and Albert Rhys Williams, whom they met in Carmel, were surrounded by standard American vacuousness. Yet they still expressed hope in the power of the antifascist Popular Front in America.

The nine chapters in Part III track Ilf and Petrov as they traveled Route 66 from Chicago to the desert Southwest. Their journey through low-rise America allowed them to experience American highways, sample American road food, and interact with hitchhikers they picked up along the way. In Arizona and New Mexico, they visited Native American villages and national parks that appear today much as Ilf and Petrov would have seen them. Retracing their journey raises in particularly acute form the basic questions of historical research: How and to what extent can we understand people separated from us by identity, ideology, language – and time?

The eight chapters in Part II focus on the most sedentary portion of Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the month they spent in and around New York City in fall 1935 hobnobbing with literary celebrities and immersing themselves in American popular culture. Investigating Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with renowned American artists and authors offers a way of tracing the transnational networks that connected Soviet and American cultural producers. How and what did they learn from each other? Where and why did they fail to understand one another? The role of immigrants in these networks looms large and allows consideration of how Soviet art and Russian artists become “American.” How did Ilf and Petrov make Soviet sense of American culture and American consumption?

Chapter 25 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s brief turn as Hollywood screenwriters. At the suggestion of the director Lewis Milestone (born Leib Milstein in the Russian empire), the pair spent nine days before Christmas 1935 holed up in their hotel writing a treatment of The Twelve Chairs – a story they did not tell in their travelogue. Still, the published work suggested bridges across the vast cultural divide. Extravagantly criticizing Hollywood films as mindless, Ilf and Petrov noted that they found many movie people who shared their perspective. Their unpublished accounts and evidence from the American side bring the central paradox of Ilf and Petrov’s Hollywood venture into sharper focus: Their brief and publicly unacknowledged work in Hollywood solidified both their disdain and their respect for the American dream factory.

This chapter analyses the transformation that the communal bonds shaped between Jerusalem’s inhabitants and the Holy Sepulchre underwent in the second half of the twelfth century, first as the mechanisms established in Jerusalem were exported and adapted to its hinterland, and then when other institutions, such as the Hospital of St John, increased their involvement in the cityscape. When this process coalesced with the increasing autonomy of the burgess population, former social structures were replaced by looser forms of collaboration between the burgesses and individual institutions. Building on this analysis, this chapter then turns to examining the social structures of Frankish Jerusalem through the comparative framework of medieval immigrant cities, in order to readdress its unique status between Western perceptions and manifestations of medieval urbanism, and local, eastern Mediterranean challenges.

This chapter presents an overview of the main arguments raised in the previous chapters and highlights the paradigm shift this book offers in our perception of the urban transformation of Frankish Jerusalem in regard to four main points: (1) the tendency to examine Jerusalem’s transformation mainly in regard to monumental religious shrines; (2) the perception that the urban fabric and municipal mechanisms remained the same throughout the twelfth century; (3) the tendency to differentiate between socio-economic and institutional processes, the evolution of symbolic landscape and the development of the cityscape; and (4) the notion that Jerusalem’s exceptional historical circumstances hinder comparative analysis. Instead, this book offers an integrative approach, which presents the cityscape as a work in progress, shaped by converging institutional, social and economic interests and motivations that were themselves affected by the shifting conditions in the Latin East in the twelfth century.

Chapter 1 examines the popular and official fascination with Amerikanizm in the Soviet Union. The term connotated not only a desire to acquire American technology, but to learn to emulate uniquely American know-how, efficiency, practicality, ingenuity, and energy. Overwhelmingly, the Soviet people who visited the United States in the 1930s came to study American technology. To take advantage of the tantalizing business opportunities offered by this Soviet interest, the US government and businesses put few restrictions on visiting engineers. Although Ilf and Petrov were writers – “engineers of human souls” rather than engineers – they too focused on the promises of American “technique” (tekhnika), positing that in Soviet hands the capitalists’ tools would serve the workers’ interests.