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.