The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

by Joseph Berger

  LITTLE NECK

  WHERE TO GO

  Douglaston Club (GREEK REVIVAL MANSION AND COURTS WHERE JOHN MCENROE LEARNED TENNIS) 600 WEST DRIVE; (718) 229-3900

  Tri-State Hall (BALLROOM AND DANCE LESSONS BY A KOREAN-POLISH TEAM) 254-18 NORTHERN BOULEVARD; (718) 631-8080

  Zion Episcopal Church (AMERICAN AND KOREAN SERVICES) 243-01 NORTHERN BOULEVARD; (718) 225-0466

  WHERE TO EAT

  Giardino Ristorante (CLASSY ITALIAN) 44-37 DOUGLASTON PARKWAY; (718) 428-1090

  Scobee Grill (DINER WITH A JEWISH SPECIALTY OR TWO) 252-29 NORTHERN BOULEVARD; (718) 428-5777

  Chapter 6

  From Russia with Longing in Brighton Beach

  IN RUSSIA, THERE IS A CHERISHED EXPRESSION, SAYS ANATOLY ALTER, furrier to the women of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach: “We're not so rich that we can buy cheap merchandise.” This thought, he says, helps explain why when winter clamps its salt-edged chill on Brighton Beach's incongruous streets, even Russian women of modest income must drape themselves in fur. Walk along bustling Brighton Beach Avenue, the flavorful spine of the neighborhood that stretches underneath an elevated subway line, and you will see fur worn not just by nouveau riche housewives who come back to the old neighborhood to shop but also by Russian grandmothers laden with plastic supermarket bags and by willowy coeds. What they wear are not synthetics or mere collars, but often full coats of lush and flowing mink or at least muskrat, beaver, rabbit, or raccoon. Even ermine, chinchilla, and sable can be spotted—just as some of the more successful apparatchiks wore them in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In fifteen minutes one frosty morning on this plebeian avenue, half the women I counted were wearing fur, more furs than I ever saw in an hour along ritzy Park Avenue.

  “We're hardworking and we make money and we can buy the same things as rich people,” Victoria Goldenstein, a robust, dark-eyed, dark-haired businesswoman, told me as she cheerfully swaddled herself in mink in Alter's store. Already sporting a lustrous mahogany mink from Bloomingdale's, she was in Alter's shop with a mink-clad friend to drop off a Persian lamb coat for repair. While there, she could not resist trying on Alter's minks. This woman emigrated from Moldova fifteen years ago—hardly long enough to make a fortune here—but she seemed surprised, even a tad insulted, that someone would think her imprudent or question her wearing something so extravagant.

  Call them ostentatious or vulgar or recklessly spendthrift, but Gold-enstein and Brighton Beach's other fur wearers reveal something essential about immigrants, something that has always reshaped the look and spirit of the city's neighborhoods and is doing so now with unusual ferocity. Immigrants who make the decision to settle here do so with more than a frisson of remorse or self-questioning. It's not that they don't take pleasure in what this country has to offer. It's just that such life-altering decisions are never made with unalloyed conviction. Those who make them always look back.

  And when they look back they want the trappings, totems, and touchstones of home, even if home was a frightening, corrupt, and stinting police state. For Russian women, whatever money they and their husbands make, they want to wrap themselves not just in the warmth of a fur coat but also in the plush feel of whatever it was that constituted luxury, when it was available.

  Entire city blocks in neighborhoods such as Brighton Beach are re-making themselves to satisfy lusts for such throwbacks—not just for furs but for food and other products of home. Dozens of Russian food shops line Brighton Beach Avenue, in the somber shadows of the elevated B and Q train lines. At M&I International Foods, for instance, there are Zabar's-like arrays not only of canned and jarred former Soviet Union products, but also of cuts of fresh meat, smoked and marinated herrings, varieties of odd fresh fish, sausages, cheeses, caviar, and black breads flown in from those countries overnight. Buxom peroxided blond sales-clerks stare at customers in bored silence or Brezhnev-era suspicion, rarely smiling. In some places customers line up Soviet-style to pay cash or food stamps before getting their groceries. There are dozens of new restaurants serving blini and pirogen and a half dozen sprawling nightclubs with Russian rock bands on stage and smoked sable and vodka on the tables. The newspaper stands are crowded not with the Daily News but with Izvestia and two or three dozen other newspapers either flown in from Russia or Ukraine or published right in New York. There are at least two Russian bookstores and other shops that stock Russian tapes and videos. English signs are translated into the Cyrillic alphabet (or vice versa). And most of the conversations along the street are in Russian.

  Visiting Brighton Beach, wrote travel writer Vitaly Vitaliev, “is a unique opportunity to visit the country that doesn't exist anymore—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics…. An American, arriving there by accident, stands out and gets stared at—like an Eskimo in the streets of Abu Dhabi.” My colleague New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise, who spent many years in the Soviet Union, wrote of Brighton Beach as a community “frozen in time” that newer immigrants brought up in an eagerly capitalist Russia dismiss as a museum, a “cartoon of Russia.” “In the traditional arc of the immigrant experience, the first ethnic outposts, like Little Italy or the Lower East Side, can often become anachronisms, resembling, at least to later arrivals, an exaggerated version of home that has become badly dated,” she eloquently wrote.

  Brighton Beach was born as an anachronism. It was developed right after the civil war by businessmen who wanted to give it the cachet of the English Channel resort. In addition to an ornate hotel with Victorian turrets and broad verandas, it boasted a boardwalk for fashionable promenading, a racetrack, and, by 1907, the fifteen-acre Brighton Beach Bath and Racquet Club. Jews of those earlier immigrations would leave tenements and shabby wood-frames of East New York and Brownsville and head not very far away to this spot that must have reminded more than a few of the Black Sea and other beach resorts they knew as children in czarist Russia. Even for those born here, Brighton Beach, with its closely packed apartment houses and summer bungalows, had the same bracing briny air and the same endless sandy beach as its more popular neighbor, Coney Island. Those who moved to Brighton found they could have a free summer vacation by the sea every year while living only a subway ride from work.

  Scrappy strivers that they were, these newcomers held what they considered classy diversions at the baths—knish-eating contests, one-wall handball tournaments, mahjong matches, marine escapades in the three swimming pools. Milton Berle and Lionel Hampton entertained them. This was the animated but sweetly homespun Brighton Beach of Eugene Morris Jerome, Neil Simon's aspiring writer in Brighton Beach Memoirs, who lived in overcrowded splendor just off the beach and lusted after his shapely cousin. It was the Brighton Beach of Neil Sedaka (his last name, his real one, is a version of tzedaka, the Hebrew word for “charity”), the pop star of the 1950s and 1960s famous for “Calendar Girl” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” Ten Sedakas were crammed into his parents' two-bedroom apartment on Coney Island Avenue and distracted themselves with his mother's Victrola by playing 78s of the Barry Sisters singing such schmaltz-dripping Yiddish war-horses as “My Yiddishe Mamme,” “Shein Vi Di L'Vone” (“Pretty As the Moon”), and “Mein Shtetele Belz” (“My Village of Belz”). That explains why in 2004 I saw Sedaka give a Yiddish concert at Carnegie Hall in which he had the joint jumping. It seemed more than just coincidence when he told me that he spent his first royalties on a “Hadassah tallis”— a mink stole—for his mother. Fur was magic even then.

  By the 1960s, the Brighton Beach Baths had 13,000 members. But that era may have been its deceptive apex. Those knish-eating, mahjong-playing Jews were getting grayer and frailer, and their children hankered after suburban backyards. Apartments of the dead and retired went begging, so the city began filling them with welfare tenants. The neighborhood, like much of the rest of the city, went into a tailspin of drugs, violence, and squalor that in its case turned out to be mercifully short.

  Rescue came in the 1970s from a most unlikely source—international diplomacy. So
viet Jews were demanding to leave their despotic country and American Jews were clamoring on their behalf. The Soviets, eager to broaden contact with the West and sign trade and disarmament treaties, used Russian refugees as bribes and barter. When the refugees came here, most of them headed to places that looked just like home. Brighton Beach became a magnet for Jews from the Black Sea port of Odessa and for other Russians as well. The neighborhood seemed to metamorphose overnight, with such cafés as Gastronom Moscow and Tatiana Restaurant serving borscht, pirozhki (fried meat pies), vatrushki (cheese pies), and kvass (a mildly alcoholic tea-colored drink made from fermented bread often flavored with strawberries or mint) right on the boardwalk, and shops selling Russian clothes, books, and bric-a-brac. In the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union splintered apart, another flood of immigrants poured in, though now many were settling in such neighborhoods as Bensonhurst and Midwood in Brooklyn, Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, and Rego Park in Queens. In 2000, the last time an official count was taken, the New York area had 236,163 immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

  I should not have been surprised by the prevalence of fur in Brighton Beach in winter. When my parents came to this country, they took deep pleasure whenever they could connect with a taste of home—a schmaltz herring from a local dairy store, a rye bread, or sour cream. They would dispatch us on quests for just the right rye bread. My mother was frugal in many respects—she never took a taxi, almost never ate in a restaurant. But she would treat herself to a fine cloth coat from Levine & Smith, a discounter of fashionable coats down on the Lower East Side, because the right coat was important for showing off her accomplishments during a shpatzir—a weekend stroll—along Broadway or Riverside Drive, which echoed a custom imported from Warsaw. And she would make sure my father had a handsome gray topcoat as well. A reckless purchase was a porcelain ballerina or baroque chess players that reminded them of the luxuries of home. “Europe” became a word I associated with quality.

  Most of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan professionals who came over in the early 1970s worked as taxi drivers, nannies, or beauticians until they qualified here to work again as doctors and professors. Now some have been here long enough to feel secure; more than a few have been able to buy some of the 850 condos in the Oceana—the development that replaced the leveled Baths—at prices starting at $500,000 and rising to $2 million for a sea-view penthouse. Others have moved to the neighborhood next door, Manhattan Beach, tearing down the wooden cottages and run-down stuccos and building gated mansions on the same small lots, the bulk and glitz offending their American neighbors. Take Alex Puzaitzer. As a teenager twenty-five years ago in Communist Odessa, Puzaitzer shared a cramped two-room apartment with his mother and older sister, sleeping on a sofa bed. But as a successful entrepreneur, he bought a small house in Manhattan Beach, razed it, and built himself a stately beige Mediterranean—with a veranda, tall metal gates, and terra-cotta roof tiles—a house that reminded him of houses he had glimpsed on visits to the Riviera. The home is spacious enough for his college-age daughter and teenage son to have their own bathrooms and for twenty relatives to dine together on holidays. But not all of Puzaitzer's neighbors in this once-unassuming suburban-like neighborhood are happy about his hard-won elbow room.

  “Each one is outdoing the other to show how big a house they can build, showing their wealth to an extreme degree, and it just doesn't fit in,” Phil Metling, a retired optometrist who has lived in Manhattan Beach since the 1950s, told me.

  What Metling missed is that often the scale of the houses reflects a family's yearning to declare that after years of scratching out a living they have arrived. Alter the furrier understands this principle of human psychology in his bones, because it's the same reason so many of his customers buy expensive furs.

  “They want people to recognize them,” he told me. “It's a little, maybe, show-off, but maybe not. Fur is glamour, and when you make the first step in life you want a nice car, nice clothing, nice jewelry, and fur is part of that. People here, the second, third generation, they stop showing off what they achieve. They don't have to.”

  In his early sixties, Alter has chiseled good looks, the erect bearing of a Cossack (a comparison he wouldn't appreciate, given the Cossack cavalrymen's pogrom-laden history), and the brazen flair of a Seventh Avenue designer. His one concession to flashing success is his diamond pinky ring. Alter, like me, is the son of Polish Jews who fled the Nazis and found refuge in the Soviet Union. His mother was originally from Lublin and ended up in Kiev, where he was born in 1941. His father, Boris Alter, operated a small government fur shop in Russia and taught Alter the ropes of the trade. The younger Alter and his wife, Raya, came here from Kiev in 1978. On his third day in New York, he found a job as a machine operator in Manhattan's fur district. Barely two years later, he opened his first fur shop in what had been a laundry on Brighton Beach Avenue. Then, ten years ago he opened a second shop a few blocks away, eventually buying the entire building. Classic Furs now carries 2,000 furs priced from as low as $500 all the way up to $40,000, and it draws buyers from Switzerland, Sweden, and Mother Russia herself. We chatted on the second floor of his emporium as Tamara Zapolotsky, a sales-woman, helped customers try on furs nearby.

  American women, he told me, waste their money on a variety of winter coats—perhaps a tweed overcoat for work, a parka for shopping and weekend walks, a camel hair for the opera. But Russians, he told me, “look to fur like everyday necessity.” They like “to look their best” when they leave the house—no parka, jeans, and sneakers for them. “In the summertime, they can show off everything else,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “In the wintertime they can't.”

  “American women, they have closets with lots of garbage—another shmatte for two hundred or three hundred dollars,” he said. “If a woman go to Anne Klein, a cloth coat can cost three thousand dollars. For three thousand dollars, she can buy a magnificent mink coat. If a woman wear an Anne Klein coat and another woman wear a mink, who's going to get more attention?”

  He believes Jewish women in America carry some of their Russian inclinations in their genes. “Every Jewish woman has to have a fur coat, and when they go to synagogue they have to wear fur. Historically, they are born with that love. Only the czar and high society in their countries were able to wear fur—mink, sable, ermine.”

  I was to learn that he had the deeply experienced insights of a veteran anthropologist. When I went to actual academics, they simply confirmed in more intellectually dense phrases what Alter had told me. Richard Alba, a distinguished professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany who specializes in ethnic studies, said that wearing fur may be flashy, but it is understandable given the struggle of gaining a foothold in this country and the need for some acknowledgment. “The ways of demonstrating that they have been able to maintain or enhance status are really very critical for immigrants,” he told me. “For the Russians, it may be having an expensive fur they couldn't afford in the Soviet Union. For the Italians, it was owning property.”

  To cater to this Russian passion for fur, the shopping district along eight blocks of Brighton Beach Avenue and along intersecting Coney Island Avenue boasts three fur shops, a number that would be striking even in an affluent part of Manhattan. Ordinary clothing stores stock a rack of furs, and even one electronics and import store had a sizable selection, though Alter and another fur shop owner, Irene Perchonok, told me furs in such places are of low quality. “We specialize in fur,” Perchonok told me. “Mentally if you're going to buy underwear, you're not going to buy it in a fur store.”

  Perhaps it's something of a conceit, but it occurred to me as I strolled the neighborhood that fur is a historically immigrant business. Much of the New World was settled by fur trappers who were willing to penetrate the pristine interior of the country in search of mammals whose pelts would safeguard them against winter. The trading posts they set up to sell their fur and buy provisions for their trade grew into some of
the great American cities. But given the Soviet Union's fabled winter, fur is particularly talismanic for women born there. It embraces them in the homeland they never stop missing, no matter how deep their affection for this country.

  Russians who grew up in this country and, hungry to fit in, despised furs as their parents' musty baggage from the Old Country often find as they grow older that they long to wear fur. “I never thought I would wear fur,” Alter's daughter, Regina, a corporate lawyer at Dreier & Baritz on Park Avenue, told me. “When I was a kid, Russians tended to wear furs and Americans didn't. Now that I'm all grown up, I see them differently. They're beautiful, they're light, they're warm, and they're back in style.”

  Diana Daniloff, a twenty-two-year-old New York University law student and immigrant from the Caucasus region, told me as she looked with her mother for a long mink in Alter's shop, “It's warm, it looks beautiful, it makes the woman look gorgeous.”

  Russians don't have the Puritan American ethos of sin and its accompanying sense of guilt and are not as easily swayed by animal-rights activists who protest the wearing of fur. Nor do Russians have the same ethic of thrift. “When you live in a country like Russia, where you are not allowed to have lots of money and everything is taken care of for you, whatever money you have, you want to spend it” is the way Alter explained the Soviet mentality. Communism discouraged people from saving since there wasn't much they could buy with their nest eggs, and it encouraged a culture of what can charitably be called an oblique approach to the law. Raya Alter told me that in such a system, signposts of prestige were important. Ordinary Russians would wear thickly lined cloth coats, while wives of government officials often wore Persian lamb coats with blue mink collars.