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1 results

  • 24 - Friends of the Soviet Union

  • from Part IV - The Golden State
  • Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, West Chester University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists
    Published online:
    18 January 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024, pp 266-273

  • Summary

    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.