Brighton Beach Without Russians?

NEW YORK -- An arc of gray sea gulls banked against a cold gust of wind and wheeled high above Brighton Beach toward the Atlantic Ocean. Sofia Garber followed the birds with her big blue eyes and pulled the fur collar of her coat to her cheeks. Standing on an expanse of boardwalk between a line of apartment buildings and the sand, Garber, 51, reflected on her life as a new immigrant, part of the first wave to arrive in Brooklyn from the Soviet Union in 1973.


"I used to work all day in the city," said Garber, who emigrated from Odessa, a Ukrainian resort city on the Black Sea. "Then I would come out here on the sand to think and cry. I didn't know what my future would be and my children's future. I would stare at the sea gulls and think: They are so free. They can fly to Odessa to see my mother and I cannot."


The first years were hard for Garber, but things improved. She and her husband worked 14-hour days at a variety of jobs, made some money, moved to a larger apartment in Brighton Beach, brought her mother over and sent two daughters to college. Brighton Beach is her home, Garber said, but she is glad her daughters, 31 and 25, have moved to suburban Westchester County and Long Island. "I feel that life has to go on," she said. "I wouldn't be happy if my children should stay in Brighton Beach. Maybe different people should be able to come to Brighton Beach and start over. That is what America is about."


It has been about 25 years since the first immigrants from the Soviet Union came to this small neighborhood in southern Brooklyn, where the rents were low and you could walk by the sea, and turned it into a Russian-speaking hub. Brighton Beach has been many things to these people: at first a disappointment, then a beachhead in a big city, then an economic launching pad. And now, for many of them, it seems to have become a stepping stone to somewhere else.


Many residents say Brighton Beach is on the cusp of a slow decline as a Russian-speaking neighborhood. The children of the immigrants are chasing the American dream to Manhattan, to other parts of Brooklyn and to the suburbs. "Old people live in Brighton Beach," said Lyudmila Reyngach, the owner of Oceanview Optical on Brighton Beach Avenue. "The young people are moving out." She said that she had been doing more and more business on weekends, when people who have moved away return to shop.


And while immigration from the former Soviet Union has slowed in recent years, people from Mexico, Pakistan and the Middle East have been moving in. "It's going to be different," said Marina Shapiro, the executive director of the Brighton Beach Business Improvement District. "It will be a multinational neighborhood, not just a Russian one."


Recent census surveys suggest that 200,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union live in the five boroughs of New York City, said Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College. And Brighton Beach still throngs with Russian-speaking people. More than half the stores on Brighton Beach Avenue are owned by immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and many residents say it will take decades for the neighborhood to lose its flavor.


Sofia Vinokurov takes a positive view. She arrived with her family of 27 in 1975 and owns a food store called the International, as well as a smoked-fish business and a nightclub. "Young people aren't moving out that much from this neighborhood," she said recently, as customers bustled around her. "You see young people with carriages and babies."


Yet like the neighborhoods of Little Italy and the Lower East Side before it, many residents said, Brighton Beach is falling victim to the very success of its recent settlers. Lydia Vareljan, the chairwoman of the Russian Division of the United Jewish Appeal, who came from Odessa in 1976 and lived for a decade in Brighton, said: "Ask me what will happen to Brighton Beach. What happened to Hester Street in the Lower East Side? But not yet. We have another 25 years, and I am sure that something will still be there, but not like it was from 1983 to 1990."


The neighborhood of Brighton Beach bridges the 20 blocks between the gimcrack attractions of Coney Island and the almost suburban Manhattan Beach. Its main street, Brighton Beach Avenue, is shadowed by the elevated D and Q subway lines. There are apartment buildings on the ocean side of the avenue and small houses on the other. Eastern European Jews began moving into the neighborhood in the 1920s, and Jewish refugees after World War II. By the 1970s, many of the older Jews had died or moved to Florida or to their children's homes in the suburbs. Shops along Brighton Beach Avenue were small and old, longtime residents said. "It was very dirty," Garber recalled.


But rents were low. The shopkeepers could communicate with the new residents in Yiddish or Polish. And the many immigrants from seaside cities like Odessa and Leningrad appreciated the shore atmosphere. "It was oceanside, and I was growing up on the Baltic Sea," explained Leonid Bogorad, who came from Leningrad in 1973. "It made me feel better."


The story of Brighton Beach as a Russian-speaking enclave began in the mid-'60s, when rumors spread through the large Jewish populations of the Soviet Union, from Leningrad to Ukraine to Belarus to Moldavia, that the government might allow some people with family in Israel to leave. Bogorad said he heard the rumor in 1970. He was in his mid-20s, and like many of the first immigrants was prosperous by Soviet standards. "Believe me, I was doing O.K.," said Bogorad, who managed a furniture store. "In Russia if you had access to imported furniture, you can make money."


Like Bogorad, the early immigrants were not fleeing severe deprivation but anti-Semitism. On one hand, the Soviet Union suppressed the practice of Judaism, so most Russian Jews knew little about their religion. On the other hand, Jews could not forget who they were. They were often called zhid, a derogatory Russian term for a Jew, beaten up in school and denied access to scholarships and the best jobs. The internal passports of all citizens of the U.S.S.R. indicated their region of residence as well as their nationality, and so all Soviet Jews had the word "Jewish" stamped on their passports. "There was anti-Semitism everywhere," Bogorad said. "Whenever you apply for anything you have to show your passport that says you are Jewish."


Officially no one was supposed to want to leave the Soviet paradise, but small numbers of Jews were allowed to emigrate beginning in the '50s. Emigration gained momentum in the mid-'60s when American Jewish organizations and the U.S. government pressured the Soviet Union to let the Jews go. The Israeli defeat of Soviet-backed Arab forces in the Six-Day War of 1967 slowed things a bit, but by the early '70s the U.S. policy of d?tente and the Soviet Union's need for American grain opened the gates.


According to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry in Washington, 17,000 people left the Soviet Union from 1968 through 1971. Most headed to Israel, but a few thousand went to the United States. Soon reports were filtering back to the Soviet Union of a strange place called Brooklyn. "In Odessa everyone was talking about Brooklyn," Vareljan said. "A letter would come, and we would all read about it."


Lawrence Avramenko, 54, who has the crew cut and broad chest of an army sergeant and the stern demeanor to match, said he was an emotional mess on the day in 1973 when he and his wife and child left Kiev on a train bound for Austria. Avramenko, a dentist, and his family were leaving their relatives, friends and possessions for a world they had never seen. They were allowed to take out $100 a person and some clothes. Going back was not an option. "I couldn't sleep," Avramenko said of that first night on the train. "I was crying as we checked into Austria."


Most immigrants went to Vienna, where they were met by Israeli officials. Some, however, decided to go to the United States instead, because they had family there or they figured economic opportunities would be better, or because they feared becoming enmeshed in Middle East tensions. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a nonprofit group that resettles refugees, helped them get to the United States via Italy. New York did not make a good first impression on many of the 1970s immigrants. To Simon Feldman, 63, a Russian who spent seven years in a Soviet prison during the 1950s, the city he glimpsed on the way from John F. Kennedy International Airport seemed depressing. "It was cold," he said from his home in Florida. "It was dark. I was disappointed to see all the painting on the subway trains," he added, referring to graffiti.


The New York Association for New Americans, a private, nonprofit agency, arranged for housing, health care, language training and social services for the immigrants during their first few months and sometimes up to a year. Those who could not be connected with family in the city were sent to single-room-occupancy hotels until they could find a place to live. Garber does not remember the experience fondly. "It was mices and cockroaches," she said. "It was hot, but I was afraid to open a window. I think someone is going to kill me." After a few days, she said, someone suggested that she look for an apartment in a neighborhood called Brighton Beach.


Two and a half decades later, in early February, the United Jewish Appeal held a glittering fund-raising party at a restaurant called Cabaret Lido in Marine Park, Brooklyn, a few miles east of Brighton, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the arrival of Sam and Ludmila Kislin, who came from Odessa and made a fortune in commodities.


Guests were greeted by an actor in a Russian commissar's outfit who interrogated them and gave them a "visa." They then passed through a curtain marked "Vienna" in Cyrillic letters and into a buffet room marked "Italy." Finally doors marked "America" were opened, and the 150 guests dined in a hall decorated with Stars and Stripes and Statues of Liberty.


There were grand bouquets of flowers and bottles of vodka and cognac on each table. The guests came dressed to kill. Women wore lots of makeup. Suits and dresses were cut in untraditional ways. Some men wore diamond studs in place of ties. The buffet featured Russian pastries, p?t?s, seafood, sushi (a Russian favorite), vegetables, breads, cheeses, cold cuts and caviar. And that was before dinner. But amid the festivity there was also a note of nostalgia. "It is a time of mixed feelings," one guest said. "Twenty years ago it was not such a happy time. It was hard work."


For the new immigrants, life in New York was initially about getting through the day, learning English and making some money at whatever job they could find and keep. Bogorad spent his first five years in factory jobs in the garment district. Garber was a waitress on the 4 a.m. shift at a local diner. Later she took a job kneading dough at a knish shop. When Vinokurov, a friend, wrote to her from Odessa asking if she should follow, Garber told her not to, delaying her by a year. "I told her, I'll get down on my knees," she said. "I am suffering here, do not come. This is another tragedy for the Jewish people."


The first immigrants in Brighton Beach, no more than a few hundred, according to old-timers, were so busy eking out an existence that few had the time, energy or money for much in the way of communal life. But things slowly improved. Garber's mother came from Odessa and helped take care of the children so that Garber could go to school to acquire office skills, and eventually get a job in the diamond district. Her husband, whom she later divorced, and a friend opened a wallpaper and chandelier shop on Brighton Beach Avenue. Bogorad took a job driving a taxi 15 hours a day, and also sold real estate in the evenings. "I was exhausted," he said. "But I was young, and if you are trying to raise a family you can't be tired."


By 1975, some emigrants were buying buildings with storefronts along Brighton Beach Avenue, which sold for as little as $5,000. Not that the businesses were an immediate success. Many struggled to learn how to make things work in a new place. "Those who opened in 1975 and '76, they failed," Vareljan said. "But by 1978 and '79 those that opened, they succeeded."


In 1978, Soviet immigrants began pouring into Brighton Beach. The Soviet authorities, courting the world in preparation for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, loosened restrictions, and from 1978 to 1980 some 23,000 came to New York, more than twice the number that had arrived in the previous five years. This influx, bringing thousands of new customers, was a boon for owners of Russian-speaking businesses. They also had people to advise. "The first ones who came, everybody called us," Garber remembered. "They called my house the Red Cross."


From 1982 to 1986, when the Soviet Union was occupying Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan was getting tough on what he called "the evil empire," immigration to New York slowed to a trickle: fewer than 500 people a year. But there were already so many immigrants in Brighton Beach that the area hopped with ethnic shops. The restaurants, in particular, became a center of social life as they never had been in the Soviet Union. There, people ate at home. In New York, the immigrants learned to let someone else cook.


Many, though, had a difficult time adjusting to American life. Mark Handelman, the executive vice president of the New York Association for New Americans, said that refugees from the Soviet Union mistrusted the government and yet expected the government to do things for them. They often withheld information from their social workers, whom they considered to be government agents, Handelman said, and became indignant when housing and jobs weren't provided for them. "They didn't understand that when they went for an interview they didn't have the job yet," he said.


American Jews had donated tens of millions of dollars to assist the Soviet Jews in settling in the United States, yet there was resentment on both sides. "There was a great clash between the American Jewish community and the Russians," said Pauline Bilus, director of resource development at the Shorefront YM-YWHA (Young Men's-Women's Hebrew Association) of Brighton-Manhattan Beach, an American who has worked with Russians since the '70s. "The Americans wanted them to be the humble, traditional Jews of their grandparents' generation."


Unlike the rural religious Jews who came from Eastern Europe a generation or more before, most Soviet Jews were well-educated city dwellers with little religious feeling. Some resented criticism of how they practiced Judaism from Americans who, as they saw it, had it easy. Yet there were also hurt feelings when the Americans got angry. "They kept their shops open on the major Jewish holidays," Bilus said. "And they wondered why the American Jews didn't embrace them." Today, Bilus said, the shops close on Yom Kippur.


These days, the crowds who wander underneath the el on Brighton Beach Avenue still speak Russian as they browse the little stands that sell pastries from all regions of the former Soviet Union. They still stop before the hulking marble facades of fancy restaurants and read the announcements of performances by the latest Russian stars. A co-op complex going up at the east end of the neighborhood, by Coney Island Avenue, has a long waiting list with many Eastern European names.


The last big wave of Russian-speaking immigrants arrived in the late '80s and early '90s after the Soviet Union collapsed. More than 20,000 came to New York in 1992 alone. But these new immigrants were different. They were better educated, had more money and knew more about the United States. Not all of them were Jewish, and greater numbers of them were illegal immigrants, coming in from their now-open country on tourist visas and staying. Yet, residents say, the old-timers and the newer immigrants seem to coexist well.


Still, the neighborhood is changing, residents say. Though no figures are available on how many immigrants from the former Soviet Union currently live in Brighton Beach, locals say many immigrants, and particularly their children, are leaving or have already left. Leonid Bogorad, who continues to work in Brighton Beach, moved to Long Island in 1978. Simon Feldman lives in Florida. Lydia Vareljan moved to suburban New Jersey. None of their children live in Brighton.


Now people from other lands are moving in. "Years ago the plane would come into New York from Russia, and they would come to my office with the luggage," said Bogorad, referring to his real-estate business. "Now we have all different groups of clients: Pakistanis and Indians, Spanish. The neighborhood is mixing up."


Immigrants from the former Soviet Union have spread out to Manhattan Beach, Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, Bergen County in northern New Jersey and Nassau County, Long Island. That has hurt Brighton, Bogorad said.


Even the Russian mafia has been forsaking Brighton Beach. "In the '70s Russian organized crime concentrated mostly in New York," said Raymond Kerr, the supervising agent in the FBI's Eastern European Organized Crime Unit. "Now it's in cities all over the country."


But more threatening to Brighton's identity over the long term, some say, is the decline in immigration. The executive vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Leonard Glickman, said he expected the trend to continue. He attributed it to tighter U.S. immigration policies and the fact that many people in the former Soviet Union who have family in the United States (a prerequisite of legal immigration) have already come. "There is a dwindling number of people in Russia who could qualify," Glickman said. "And the government has made it harder for them to assert a credible fear of persecution."


The director of refugee programs for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Kathleen Thompson, agreed that immigration had declined, but said the rules had not changed. "There is a dwindling number of people in Russia who would qualify for the U.S.," she said. Yet she acknowledged that rising anti-Semitism could spur new immigration.


So far the effects of the decline have been small, Brighton business leaders said, though the founder of the Brighton Neighborhood Association, Pat Singer, said some restaurateurs had told her they were seeing fewer customers. "But they aren't strangling," she said. "They are doing well." She pointed out that new restaurants have opened in recent years.


Russian Brighton Beach has come further, and more quickly, in its first 25 years than other ethnic neighborhoods in New York. Perhaps that is one reason many old-timers do not seem worried about its future. They have gone through too much to be overly sentimental. If the blessing that Brighton has been to them is passed on to another group, so be it.


As Bogorad said: "Brighton Beach came by at the right time for the right people. It was our place for so many years. One day it will be for someone else."


New York Times Service