10 - Complex Hybrids

Summary

Chapter 10 uncovers the Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire who, to an extent elided in Ilf and Petrov’s published work, served them as critical cultural mediators. It recounts their hunt for a guide willing to accompany them on their road trip, and sketches the biographies of their eventual “angels,” the retired GE engineer Solomon Trone and his wife Florence Trone, who became the prototypes for the fictionalized Mr. and Mrs. Adams. Recovering the writers’ connections with people like the Trones, the chapter explores cultural exchange as a process that at once sharpened and blurred the lines between "us" and the "Other."