We had people in Milwaukee and could have moved out there. Nothing against Wisconsin and the Midwest, but I can’t imagine how different my life would have been if my parents had taken that route. New York City is the life for me, my true home, full of energy and possibility and excitement. Even today, whenever I stay for long stretches in L.A., somewhere in my heart I rest easy with the knowledge that the City is just a plane ride away.
In Brooklyn, the Chmerkovskiy family was no longer surrounded by people who looked like us, sounded like us, and lived like us. We were now trying to survive amid huge numbers of other immigrants from all over the world. As much of a melting pot as Odessa had been, Brooklyn was on a whole different level. Just a walk down the block meant I’d hear maybe a half-dozen different languages, with countless heritages represented: African American, Italian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Russian, Polish, Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Muslim, Albanian. It was New York City, man!
To my young ears, all of the voices sounded Italian. Jewish, Russian, Latino, it didn’t matter, everyone had an Italian accent, which meant excessive swearing, excessive fronting, and excessive displays of the alpha-dog survival instinct.
There was no place in the world with more tough guys than New York City. As a teenager I once wrote:
New York City, my concrete jungle
These streets make the proudest cat humble
Make the loudest dog mumble
On these streets you don’t rumble
You get stomped on and fumbled
My brother had been fumbled right out of his Rollerblades by a virtual United Nations—six dudes, including the Italian twins, an Asian kid, and a Russian kid with a Rottweiler. Like I said, all of them sounded Italian to me, all of them seemed to be called Vinny, Anthony, or Mike. In that neighborhood, you could be a Jewish kid named Misha Guberg, but you’d very quickly become “Mike G” on the street.
The Rollerblade fiasco turned out to be a pretty cheap price to pay for a vital, life-saving lesson. The message came in loud and clear: we had to protect ourselves. In the States, we were now navigating in a completely different setting, and the rules from Ukraine didn’t apply here.
When you’re forced to survive, you find out a great deal about yourself and very quickly come to understand just exactly what you’re capable of. We landed in Brooklyn and it was as though we had immediately stepped aboard a treadmill screaming along at two hundred miles per hour. Whiplash city. No breaks, no let up, no time outs.
From our crummy apartment on Avenue X, I remember hoping that somehow we’d be able to move up the alphabet in the future, because the lucky people on Avenues A, B, or C had to be leading better, wealthier, safer lives. My mom and dad enrolled me in second grade classes at P.S. 216. I had a two-block walk to school, and for the first few weeks my mother accompanied me, but eventually I fell in with other kids from the neighborhood who were heading there, too.
The streets could be brutal, and I saw a lot of shit I probably should not have. Living near West Playground and innocently heading past it as I went to and from school, several times I encountered scenes of spontaneous violence. Seared into my young memory was an incident when four attackers ganged up on a couple, the man getting bloodied in a vicious beating, the woman pleading for it to stop. A whole gang of dudes picking on a guy with his lady—I had never before been introduced to that level of aggression, certainly not in my neighborhood back in Odessa.
Did those early days in South Brooklyn shape my life? Absolutely. In witnessing violence I learned to look out for myself, for my own safety and well-being. I might have been all of eight or nine, but the city taught me that I had to get it together in order to make it through to the next day. Even the name of my neighborhood had a life-and-death ring to it: Gravesend. As much as my father, mother, and brother had my back at home, nobody was holding my hand when I ventured out into the streets. I had to figure it out on my own.
Odd as it sounds, the move to Brooklyn led us to connect to our Jewish roots much more than any experience we’d had in Ukraine. It all started with Maks’s school. According to educational district boundaries, my brother was supposed to go to Abraham Lincoln High, which was pretty rough in those days, obviously a reflection of the neighborhood as a whole. My parents visited the school to check it out and meet with the administrators, but neither of them spoke much English so I’m not sure how they communicated. But from that initial visit they took away a stark picture of the school environment. In the hallway they encountered the Lincoln High football team clattering past on spikes. To the immigrant eyes of my parents, the boys looked like hulking gangbangers, all tattoos and fades.
“Um, I think Maks will go to yeshiva,” my mother whispered to my father.
My brother wound up at Sinai Academy, a school heavily populated with Russian immigrants, many of them not particularly observant or religious. Like the Chmerkovskiy family, Maks’s schoolmates weren’t so much Jewish as Jew-ish, just trying to get themselves out of the public education environment. The yeshiva’s administration devoted itself to correcting that state of affairs. This was the first time Maks was really exposed to religion on such an intense level. His school day no longer consisted only of chemistry, biology, math, and English, but also featured three to four hours of biblical studies and religious history.
Maks quickly realized that the program wasn’t for him, and we as a family realized we were more cultural than religious Jews. Judaism was part of our heritage, for sure, but so were many other influences. Religion by no means took first place, especially not above our passion and commitment to family.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe in God, I am faithful, and I do feel like there’s something larger in the universe than little old individual Val. But did I ever have a formal, specific, ritualized relation to a higher being? No. Ultimately, what were we as a family looking for at the yeshiva? Shelter? Safety? We didn’t want to choose shelter and safety at the expense of losing educational freedom and the ability to interact with a wide range of people, or being informed by more than just a single school of thought.
Maks left Sinai Academy after only a few months to enroll in Midwood High School in Flatbush, still a huge public school, but maybe a little less rough around the edges when compared with Lincoln.
Meanwhile, at P.S. 216 the fists were flying more than they ever had in Odessa, or so it seemed to me, although the unruliness was probably just normal grade-school stuff. The insults might have been a little rawer, the trash talk a little trashier. I got a lot of “go back to Russia.” The only time I remember answering back, I said something that I regret to this day.
“You stinkin’ immigrant!” yelled a black girl a little older than I was. “Go live in your own fucking country.”
I responded in Russian with something terrible.
“What did you say?” she demanded. “What did he just say?”
A Russian kid translated it to her. “He said, ‘Why don’t you go back to Africa yourself?’”
She started crying and the whole incident blew up to the point where I almost got expelled. And absolutely, I should have gotten fucking expelled for the ugly thing I said, which no doubt I had picked up on the street somewhere, overhearing brute ignorance expressed out loud. I was eight years old and possessed zero sensitivity about what was coming out of my mouth. Before moving to the States, I had lived in a world where I never saw a single black person, so I had no context, no understanding. Understanding comes from experience, and tolerance comes from understanding, but I was a little idiot who just got his feelings hurt and lashed out with a stupid insult.
A year later, even six months later, I was a different person, because by that time I had built an almost dizzying number of friendships. By third grade I was becoming assimilated into an urban culture that I fell deeply in love with, and a lot of it was based on African American experience. As many hardships as I’ve been through, I could never claim a deep understanding of the hardships of being
black in America. But I managed to shed at least some of my ignorance through a combination of education and friendship.
It helped that I loved history, so I learned about American history and African American history. I lived in a diverse neighborhood where everything I was doing involved all kinds of different people. Soon enough no one was a “black kid” to me, or a “Puerto Rican kid,” they were simply my friends. Looking back it still seems an amazing process, this opening of the heart to people different from yourself.
“The enemy is fear,” Gandhi said. “We think it is hate, but it is really fear.”
Stereotyping was just another version of fear, fear of the other, probably based somewhere deep in the human character. In the past, cavemen distrusted the tribe from the next valley over. What’s great is when we elevate ourselves beyond such a fearful, knee-jerk response to the world. That’s a great gift New York City gave to me, the gift of an open heart. It forces you to evolve beyond the animalistic instincts that we all possess.
I wasn’t exactly oblivious to the differences in the upbringing of my friends, but at the same time nobody around me looked at differences with hate. Emerging from that eight-year-old’s fog of ignorance, I began to consider social differences mainly with interest and curiosity. I found myself not intimidated but delighted by people from other cultures.
Instinctively, like every other kid around me, I was trying to make do with whatever gifts I had. What did I have? From my experience at the Music Academy, I already knew that I could perform. I had a few barely remembered lessons in ballroom back in Odessa, so I knew I could dance. Did I go around advertising that fact? Are you kidding me? As an outsider desperately trying to fit in, I would have rather cut off my feet than admit that I was a dancer.
But I kept wishing that I could use my hidden skill somewhere, somehow. Then my teachers announced that the third graders would mount a play based on the Happy Days TV sitcom, which was probably the most deeply felt portrait of American pop culture at the time. Of course, I did not get cast as the lead, the cooler-than-cool Fonzie, or even All-American Richie Cunningham, both of whom were well beyond my reach. But I did land the role of Potsie Weber, Richie’s best friend and sidekick, who was sort of dim and the butt of many jokes, but a likable kid nonetheless.
That little school show where I played Potsie was the first time I plugged into the thrill of public performance. I was playing a real American character, and I was saying lines in English, which was cool. In the middle of the show the cast had a dance number, a 1950s rock ’n’ roll show-stopper. I fucking killed it. I was Potsie, but I was also James Brown, Elvis, and Bruce Springsteen.
In that moment, my ability to dance changed from being something I wanted to hide, and turned instead into my superpower. I went from being a weird kid with an accent, whose mom made him tuck in his shirt every day and who never wore Jordans or Nikes, to one of the cool kids. I might have been playing the nerdy Potsie, but I was a stud-ass little performer on that grade-school stage. I got laughs, I got applause. I could hear the buzz from parents and kids. “Who is that guy?”
What pumped me up was not the praise, but how much a change it was from the usual stereotyping that I had encountered. No one said, “Oh, there’s a Russian kid—let’s send him back to where he came from.” I got none of that. It was more on the order of amused amazement: “Oh, dope. I like that kid!”
A few years ago, I went back and visited P.S. 216, invited by a teacher who amazingly enough remembered me and reconnected via Twitter. “Yes, my God, you were really talented,” she recalled. “We all knew you were going to be somebody.”
I almost started crying when I heard that, because it represented recognition by people who had known me and were invested in my early education. To be able to fulfill their expectations gave me an incredible lift. I even spoke at a P.S. 216 graduation ceremony, an experience that was like my Oscars, my Golden Globes, my Emmys, my everything. Returning to my elementary school, walking through those halls so alive with memories—I got chills right now just writing about it.
EVEN AT HOME, I WAS BECOMING THE GO-TO PERFORMER IN MY family. As newly arrived immigrants only gradually becoming comfortable with English, we loved any loose, physical, easy-to-understand comedy shows on television, and one of our favorites was always Family Matters. Jaleel White as Steve Urkel was a scream to us. Gathered around the dinner table, and especially if we had relatives over, my parents would often make the same request.
“Valya, Valya, show them the Steve Urkel.”
I’d roll up my pants, put on my grandma’s glasses, and repeat the character’s signature riff.
“Did I do that? Did I do that?” Snort, snort.
It never ended there. I was the official party trick for the whole family.
“Valya, Valya, play that song. Play the violin. Play something on the violin.”
I would get out my fiddle and riff on a Schubert melody. I always got applause and approval—and requests for more.
“Valya, Valya, something else, something else, please!”
Midperformance I’d glance over at Maks, sitting there with the others, looking on. My brother was shyer than I was, and because he didn’t push himself forward, his presence was not really felt in the room.
When we first came to the States, Maks was at an awkward, in-between age, fourteen years old, a time objectively recognized as among the most horrendous periods of adolescence. Hormones were raging, voices were changing, acne erupted, and social graces were not yet fully developed. Hitting grade school as a newcomer, as I did, was a lot different from Maks’s hitting high school, where the cliques and peer pressure could be vicious.
I don’t want to take anything away from him. He would later fully grow into his height and his almost impossible handsomeness. Even back then he wasn’t a pushover by any means, but he simply didn’t have his legs underneath him in America yet. His immediate immigrant experience was totally unlike mine. The six years between us made all the difference. The worst that could happen to me was that I might be slapped around a little on the playground, while he had to make his way among youth gangs equipped with assorted lethal weaponry.
In fact, our emigration experience had also been totally different. When we left Odessa he was fourteen and had a circle of close friends, and he had a girl he liked a lot, too—his dance partner, with whom he was in love. In contrast, I was a little eight-year-old kid, excited to be going to the States.
But some of our differences lay in our personalities. I wasn’t going to be bullied. Even if some kid attempted such an indignity, I had the energy to assimilate and to adjust and to politic my way out of pretty much any situation. If I ever got into a tough situation, I made sure I had five dudes who were even tougher next to me.
My brother didn’t have the personality to marshal those five dudes as backup. At fourteen my brother lacked the social skills that I possessed at eight. He was at an age when kids have a lot more insecurities than when they’re younger. Maks came in cold to a different country with no language skills in English, and all of a sudden there were girls involved in the equation. He was navigating a different terrain than I was, where the stakes were a bit higher and the possibilities for embarrassment were a bit more extreme.
Maks also happened to have quite literally shit his pants on the flight to America. Stuck in the middle seat in coach, maybe disoriented by the newness of the experience, he could not summon the balls to speak up, disturb his seat mates, and head to the toilet. There was a long line for the john, anyway, and at that point Maks didn’t have it in him to say, “Hey, yo, I gotta cut the line.” So he wound up landing in the United States with a pantload.
Whenever I tease him about this story, he always responds by bringing up how smelly I was as a baby. He was six when I was born, so I’m sure he encountered his share of my dirty diapers back then. One pantload story deserves another, I suppose.
We all had to hit the ground running when we arrived in Brook
lyn. Maks was forced into a leadership role immediately. In fact, we were all forced to take on new responsibilities, but the others in the family were probably more comfortable than Maks, since the demands of his new country had effectively pushed him out of his comfort zone. I was younger and more carefree.
But even as a kid back in Ukraine, my brother hadn’t exhibited a can-do, going-balls-out kind of personality. He was a bookworm. In America, he was a tall, awkward dude who couldn’t immediately find his place. Entering high school in Flatbush, there was no older brother to tell him how to fit in. He had no friend or cousin or anybody to guide him: “Hey, try to make friends with this guy” or “Take those classes” or “You should join this team.” He was on his own.
The two of us had some of the typical high school experiences, but we never joined school athletic teams, and we were never part of any clubs, so that interfered with opportunities to assimilate. We didn’t do sports after school, we went to dance or music lessons. And we always quickly returned to home base, bringing back the fruits of our labor to share with the household.
My parents signed Maks up to teach at a local dance academy, and he made friends there, but they turned out to be kids who were not very nice to him. He also wasn’t the best at choosing friends at Edward R. Murrow High, so he had a rough time all around. The truth of it was, his best friend during this time was his eight-year-old brother. He never really confided his troubles to me, and he never cried himself to sleep or anything like that, but I could clearly feel the intimidating energy that was blowing through his life.
I don’t want to take anything away from me, either, because I was a cool-ass little kid. I was the dude who people reached out to. Even though he didn’t unload his deepest secrets, Maks felt more comfortable trusting me than any of his friends. For the formative years of our lives, from when I was eight years old until I was, say, twelve or thirteen, we were as tight as two brothers could be. Those years established the bond that we have today. Maks will always be my oldest and most genuine friend. Not all siblings are close, but I’ve been best friends with that dude for a long time.
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