Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995 (2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War (2015).
Kirschenbaum applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, and reported the following:
If you opened Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists to page 99, you would find the first page of the chapter on what I call “complex hybrids.” In 1935, these “hybrids,” mostly Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, helped the Soviet satirists Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov pull off an epic 10,000-mile road trip across America. The chapter begins with the observation that the writers’ “dream of seeing and understanding America faced two daunting obstacles: Neither spoke much English and neither knew how to drive.” To overcome these difficulties, they relied on “immigrants from the Russian empire to show them around.” However, the authors omitted most of these mediators from their published travelogue, One-Story America (Odnoetazhnaia Amerika). Page 99 emphasizes that the chapter recovers the stories of the individuals who facilitated Ilf and Petrov’s discovery of America and “reveals a central and incompletely suppressed paradox of their quest: their impressions of ‘real’ America came filtered through the eyes and mouths of outsiders or immigrants.”Learn more about Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists at the Cambridge University Press website.
The Page 99 Test works well to give readers a sense of the book’s methods and arguments. My interest in retracing Ilf and Petrov’s road trip grew out of a desire to locate the people who worked to construct friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Page 99 introduces a critical, but publicly unacknowledged subset of these individuals – immigrants from the Russian empire, who served as the writers’ guides and translators. Citing Ilf’s notebook, page 99 suggests that clues in the pair’s unpublished writing allowed me to track down many of their contacts. The page also hints at the importance of highways in Ilf and Petrov’s account of America; their early adventures convinced them that to really understand the country, they had to travel by car, not train.
Focused on Ilf and Petrov’s omissions, page 99 sheds little light on how I learned the stories of the pair’s American interlocutors. In the case of the complex hybrids, I relied on personal papers and FBI files. The most challenging problem I faced was finding the more ordinary people with whom Ilf and Petrov interacted. In these cases, I had to generate creative sourcing solutions such as the remarkable series of life history interviews collected in 1935-1936 as part of a survey of San Francisco’s foreign-born population.
Finally, this single page may give readers the mistaken impression that I retraced Ilf and Petrov’s journey primarily as a means of judging their accuracy. While page 99 highlights the writers’ dependence on immigrants, it has little to say about why immigrants wanted to help. Nor does it address the book’s larger goal of understanding the process of cross-cultural understanding and misunderstanding. By reading Ilf and Petrov’s notes and narratives against the American sources, the book aims to illuminate the shared concerns as well as the preconceptions and misconceptions that guided and sometimes limited efforts to bridge cultural, linguistic, and political divides.
--Marshal Zeringue
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