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

by Joseph Berger

  “People want to get in America what they couldn't get in Russia,” she said.

  Moreover Russians here finally feel secure. “They feel themselves in their own country, their own place,” Alter said. “And they're not worried about tomorrow. Tomorrow they can buy a Chevrolet. Today they want a Mercedes. They want to live today.” So Russians are more likely to spend their spare cash and not worry about squirreling money away for retirement or for their children.

  Perchonok, owner of Majestic Furs on Coney Island Avenue, articulated the difference between the Russian and American philosophies of life pithily. She is an immigrant from St. Petersburg who has been here since 1975, yet is typically Russian in many ways, as evidenced by her insistence on close family ties. Her adult son calls her every day.

  “American people like to put money in a bank; Russian people like to live—go on a good vacation, have good houses,” she said. “American people believe they're going to leave a will for their children, so the children have to wait for the parents to die. Russian people, they give their children today. If I have it, let them enjoy it.

  “Show me a woman who does not like a fur coat or diamonds. I never met one. If you can afford mink, you buy mink. If not, you wear rabbit or sheepskin. In Russia we believe you better buy one, but a good one. In Russia we always say, ‘We are not that rich to buy cheap things.’”

  Oh, yes, I had heard that expression before.

  IN MY TRAVELS around Brooklyn, I also discovered another totem of home that has infused Russian life in New York. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I learned, have opened a dozen ballroom-dancing schools and studios where hundreds of children, in flouncing skirts or flashy sports shorts, learn how to dance sambas, waltzes, mambos, and jive dances while their ambitious mothers fret in the waiting rooms. For Americans, ballroom dancing may be archaic, reeking of royalty and the czarist balls, but in Russia it is still an emblem of cultivation, and immigrants want to sustain it here. Indeed, imported Soviet-bred dancers are reviving the art of ballroom dancing not just in New York and not just for Russians, but for Americans across large parts of the United States. A telling result is that in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, immigrants from the former Soviet Union now own eleven of the twenty-three Fred Astaire dance studios, the chain of franchises that Astaire, the icon of suave, founded in 1947 to spread his terpsichorean grace through the American populace.

  There are ballroom dance studios in Brighton Beach, but for variety's sake I took the subway four stops north in Brooklyn to Midwood. There, new Soviet immigrants who can't find apartments in crowded Brighton Beach are settling in apartment houses scattered among single-family homes occupied by Orthodox Jews and by longer-settled Russians who are prospering well enough to afford Midwood's houses. On Quentin Road, I found the King's Ballroom and DanceSport Center, an island of elegance among the neighborhood's helter-skelter sidewalks. It had a bright room the size of a basketball court and with the same light hardwood floor. In the narrow reception room, I came across the brothers Atanasov—Dimitre, fourteen, Vladimir, twelve, and Alex, nine. We talked for a half hour about their interest in dance and they told me in unaccented and smoothly vernacular English that they had to take up to five hours a week of dance lessons after school, grumbling like typical American boys. Dimitre suggested that the afternoon dance lessons are so uncool, he hides them from his friends at Dyker Heights Intermediate School. “I'm there 24/7,” he complained. “I spend more time there than at home.”

  I particularly enjoyed talking to them, with their immigrant parents alongside, because they reminded me of my family whenever we used to encounter Americans. While our parents sometimes mangled the language, my brother and I, and later my sister, conversed with a slangy authority, our European roots barely audible on our lips. But we too immersed ourselves in traditions our parents needed to cling to—in our case the Orthodox yeshiva world our parents had been raised in. There were more than a few times that my brother and I also thought that inherited world fusty and uncool.

  Yet, while the Atanasovs whine like typical American boys, the three brothers do not dance like typical American boys. While I was there, they spun three stylish girls across the gleaming floor, doing a rumba to the music of “Skylark” and a jive dance to Duke Ellington's “Take the A Train.” The couples were not just counting steps but doing splits and raising legs in the air with masterly panache.

  It is dancing like theirs that has allowed Russians and other émigrés from the former Soviet Union to dominate American dancing competition. In the last decade, exquisitely trained dancers looking for American-sized paydays have immigrated to the United States and become the luminaries of professional and amateur ballroom. They have elevated the quality of showmanship, executing their rumbas and waltzes with a flourish and precision rarely seen here since the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire. They have dressed up their moves with Fosse-like angling of the hips and shoulders, giving dance more of a postmodern edge and athleticism. In the process, the Russians have spurred something of a revival of cheek-to-cheek dancing. Archie C. Hazelwood, the former president of the United States Amateur Ballroom Dancers Association, told me that “ballroom dancing has increased in popularity and a big factor are immigrants.”

  Russians teach dance to earn money for the costumes and entry fees they need to compete or simply to earn a living. At Brooklyn College in Midwood, Sergei Nabatov, a forty-eight-year-old Ukrainian and onetime international champion, offers four different one-credit courses in ballroom dancing. At eight o'clock one morning—not exactly waltz time—I saw Nabatov put thirty-seven smartly dressed but often gawky students from the Dominican Republic, Israel, and Colombia, as well as garden-variety Americans, through a series of swirling rumbas and Lindies. It was their finals, and Nabatov was grading them. The students seemed to relish the test in a way they would not have had it been in organic chemistry. One immigrant from Vietnam, Julia Mach, told me that she was once “a girl who sat out dances.” “Now I enjoy it so much, the feeling you get when you can match the mood and the music,” she said. “I love it!”

  The Russians here were practically born to dance. In Moscow, for instance, every public school offers ballroom dancing and children start taking lessons in the first grade and continue at least through the fourth. After school, many parents send children for private lessons. Just as it did for gymnastics, the Soviet Union set up rigorous dance programs for the most promising young people so they could shine in international competition. Even now, dance contests are often broadcast on television, something that until recently was rare in the United States.

  The tradition of ballroom dancing, of course, extends at least as far back as the great czarist balls. But in more recent decades, dancing became an expression of what Dr. Anna Shternshis, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studies popular Russian culture, called “culturedness.” Once, you were considered cultured if your house had such simple possessions as a lamp, books, a tablecloth. Later on, you were considered cultured if you gave your children music and dance lessons. The interest in dancing was especially strong among Jews, who in New York compose a majority of the Russians. Since in the Soviet Union they were commonly barred from religious expression, they adopted secular expressions of their identity.

  “They had to invent things that made them Jewish,” she said. “It was a hidden Jewish identity because there was no other way to develop a Jewish identity. So the children do ballroom dancing and study music and try to do well in school because they think this is what their parents think it means to be Jewish.”

  Here, the parents are often too burdened carving out new lives to spend money on dance lessons for themselves. But they enroll their children in schools in Brooklyn or in dance camps in the Catskills. The professionals, of course, make sure their offspring take their art seriously. Irina Atanasov, the mother of the dancing Atanasovs, is a professional dancer, and her Bulgarian-born husband, Dimitre, manages a Fred Ast
aire studio on East Forty-third Street in Manhattan. “In high school, when we had gathering, we didn't smoke, or do drugs—we danced,” he said. “There is the erotic background—it's nice to feel a young girl's body next to you, to flirt. It gives some predisposition to dance.” Dimitre wonders if the decline of dance in the United States was the result of the sexual revolution, which made it easier to have sex without dancing's foreplay.

  Many of the Russian champions who came here, such as Taliat Tarsinov and his wife, Marina, intended to go back. “We will come to America, we will make money, we will get rich, and we will go back,” he said of his thoughts in 1992. “When we left we were crying.” But life here has proven too good to forsake. He owns the Astaire studio on East Eighty-sixth Street in Manhattan. He does not just prepare people for weddings and bar mitzvahs, but refines the moves of champion dancers, so they express the music's inherent drama. “When I teach a couple ballroom dancing, I tell them it will be a reflection of life,” he said. “I will teach you how to lead and follow, how to give each other space so everybody will feel comfortable, how to be next to each other but not in the way of each other. It's a conversation between two people, and it's all about man and woman and their relationship to the music. It's a very good sexual education. You learn how to respect your partner, if you're a man to see a woman in front of you.”

  While the Russians have much to teach, they are also learning much from Americans, particularly the capitalist skills of marketing and advertising needed to transform a notion into a thriving business. “We're learning how to be successful, how to make dance studio a hot spot,” Tarsinov told me. “We Russians don't know how to sell, and we like to learn.”

  If they do win converts to ballroom dancing around the country, the Russians will have achieved a turnabout of sorts. In the 1957 hit musical Silk Stockings, Astaire played an American who wielded his elegant footwork to convert three comrades and a long-legged Ninotchka (Cyd Charisse) to the joys of capitalism. Now, in real life in the United States, the Russians seem to have turned the tables, wielding elegant footwork to take over the art Astaire is most identified with, and doing so in true capitalist style.

  BRIGHTON BEACH

  WHERE TO GO

  Boardwalk (WALK ALONG THE ATLANTIC OCEAN ALL THE WAY TO CONEY ISLAND)

  Brighton Beach Avenue (FROM OCEAN PARKWAY TO CONEY ISLAND AVENUE, A RUSSIAN BAZAAR)

  Classic Furs (ONE OF THE CITY'S LARGEST FUR SHOPS AND AN ETHNIC TREAT) 221 BRIGHTON BEACH AVENUE; (718) 332-5138

  King's Ballroom and DanceSport Center (DANCE LESSONS FIT FOR A CZAR'S CHILD) 1207 QUENTIN ROAD, MIDWOOD NEIGHBORHOOD OF BROOKLYN; (718) 336-3627

  M&I International Foods (THE ZABAR'S OF BRIGHTON BEACH) 249 BRIGHTON BEACH AVENUE; (718) 615-1011

  WHERE TO EAT

  Café Arbat (STYLISH RUSSIAN BISTRO) 306 BRIGHTON BEACH AVENUE; (718) 332-5050

  Café Tatiana (BORSCHT WITH A TROPICAL DéCOR) 3145 BRIGHTON THIRD STREET, ON THE BOARDWALK; (718) 646-7630

  Moscow Cafe (BORSCHT SERVED TO THE SOUND OF CLACKING DOMINOES AND OWNED BY THE WINTER GARDEN BANQUET HALL NEXT DOOR) 3152 BRIGHTON SIXTH STREET, ON THE BOARDWALK; (718) 934-6666

  Chapter 7

  Long Day's Journey from Bedford Park

  THERE ARE SOME SMALL MERCIES TO LIVING A TWO-HOUR TREK by subway and bus from a low-paying job.

  In the morning, Intesar Museitef always gets a seat on the D train because her station is the second from the line's origin in an eclectic huddle of apartment houses in the northern Bronx known as Bedford Park. On the return trip home she always gets a seat on the E train because the station she gets on in the far reaches of Queens is at the beginning of that line. Otherwise, her four-hour round-trip, which takes her under virtually the full breadth of the city and includes the added torment of two fifteen-minute bus rides, is dull, achingly so.

  “It's boring,” Museitef (Moo-seh-tef ) told me as we started her return trip one spring afternoon after she finished spending four hours caring for a frail widow. “To sit for two hours on a train is boring.”

  Sure, there are suburban commuters to New York from, say, Dutchess County or the Poconos who endure four-hour commutes, but usually they are drawn by Wall Street jobs with hefty bonuses or blue-collar jobs with ample wages and benefits. But there are workers in all corners of the city who are willing to travel breathtaking distances— sometimes for as many hours as they work—for few dollars and virtually no benefits. They do this because whatever small amount they make is essential to putting food on the table and self-respect in their souls, and they can't be choosy about where the job is. Museitef, a pretty, sad-eyed Palestinian immigrant who covers her long dark hair with a head scarf and greets the world with a genial, even garrulous manner, commutes four hours each workday just to work four hours a day and twenty hours a week. She gets paid $7 an hour, but if the time consumed commuting is factored in as part of her workday, she is actually getting paid $3.50 an hour, far below the minimum wage.

  Most of the people in New York City who punish themselves with these long commutes for low-wage household jobs are, like Museitef, immigrants, and they often live in modest neighborhoods such as Bedford Park, far from the city's center, with no outstanding charms or attractions to recommend them other than that they are along a subway line and their remoteness makes their apartments relative bargains. These immigrants living in the city's low-rent fringes are willing to travel to distant jobs for work for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: That's where the money is.

  Neighborhoods with still-affordable rents such as East New York in Brooklyn and Bedford Park in the Bronx are filling up with immigrants, but the places they work may be in Tribeca; Rye, New York; Oyster Bay, Long Island; or Teaneck, New Jersey. The reason for the disjunction between work and home is economic. The families who can afford babysitters and cleaning women live in Manhattan's plush heartland or in verdant pockets on the city's margins or suburbs. The people who work for them cannot afford the car needed to live in the suburbs, nor can they afford apartments close to midtown. So, many choose to live on the outskirts of the city reachable by subway, train, or bus, though not necessarily the same outskirts where the jobs are available.

  Time is a flexible commodity for these workers; money is not. They throw away the precious time most of us demand for ourselves to give our lives some zest—time for eating dinner with the children, going to a movie, lunching with friends—so they can earn what they need to get by. Museitef, in her early thirties when I met her, is a divorcée who must work to feed and clothe herself and her seven-year-old son, Mouath, and pay the rent on their third-floor apartment on the upper end of the Grand Concourse, the legendary tree-lined boulevard of decorous apartment houses where I lived as a teenager. Even if there hadn't been that Concourse coincidence, I was drawn to Museitef's story because I had long thought about immigrants who have tiring treks to jobs few others want to do. For one thing, I have employed them. For fifteen years, my wife and I have lived in suburban Westchester County, and we have had a succession of nannies and cleaning ladies to tidy our home and keep an eye on our daughter, Annie, when she was young. Almost all of them traveled from Queens or Brooklyn, and not from just any parts of those boroughs, but often from the far end of those boroughs. Nazmoon, the Guyanese babysitter who took care of Annie when she was in grade school, journeyed to our house from Richmond Hill, Queens, enduring a forty-minute subway ride to Grand Central followed by a half-hour railroad commute. A cleaning lady we employed, a Colombian immigrant named Aura, came from just as far away in Jackson Heights, Queens. Like many working parents hoping to keep a lid on our roiling lives, we didn't ask too many questions about what such rides meant in terms of lost money, wasted time, and assaults on the spirit. We were happy to have found someone who was tender and conscientious with our child or took pride in an unblemished home.

  Even before we hired Nazmoon, I knew in my marrow the price of those commutes, for my immigrant father was such a commuter. Withi
n a few weeks of getting off the boat, he was told of a job in Newark, New Jersey, that paid $40 a week for a week that lasted from early Monday morning until midday Saturday. We were living in New York City then, on the West Side of Manhattan, an hour's commute from Newark. Later we moved even farther from his job—the Concourse, an hour and a half from Newark. My father was almost always out of the house by the time I awoke, but occasionally I opened my eyes in time to glimpse his gangly, black-haired figure rise at 5:45 a.m. or so, and sometimes I would get out of bed to watch him gobble down a piece of buttered rye bread for breakfast washed down with instant coffee. He would slap together a cheese sandwich for lunch and rush out of the house to catch the subway down to Canal Street, where he would still have to rendezvous with Sam and Leo, two co-workers who were driving from Brooklyn and would give him a lift through the fumes and traffic jams of the Holland Tunnel to the General Textile Company in Newark. The company made the asbestos-lined covers for ironing boards, and that hour-and-a-half commute was for the pleasure of crawling under sewing machines to oil or repair them and to make sure the Puerto Rican seamstresses had all the fabric and needles they needed.

  I could not help noticing the imprint left by his work and long slog home. We would hear the key turning around 7:30 every night, and there would be my father, with a smile that confirmed his delight in seeing us but also a fog of weariness over his ebony eyes. Sometimes he surprised us with three small Van Houten bittersweet chocolates he would buy in the penny vending machines that in those years were ubiquitous in subway stations. Our pleasure—and the plate of food my mother would bring out for him—was his compensation for all that effort. My father was a shy, introverted man who carried the pain of losing his entire family in the Holocaust buried inside him, so that may explain why he and I talked so little during the years I grew up in his house. But the time stolen from his life by that job and that commute was partly to blame as well.