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

by Joseph Berger

  “Many men don't want to come home, because she wants to tell him all the problems and he wants to get free,” said Davidov, a fiftyish immigrant from Tashkent.

  Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yehoshua, a tall man with a straight back and a long beard, reinforces such lessons by reminding his community that the Torah and Talmud prohibit physical and verbal abuse, and that marriage requires consensus, not imposition of one spouse's will.

  A new generation raised here regards routine assaults on women as an anachronism unfit for an egalitarian country. Olga Nisanov, the rabbi's wife, urges women not to tolerate violence and to contact professionals or rabbis if husbands degrade them. Svetlana Kariyev, Rabbi Nisanov's mother-in-law, has seen palpable changes. She came here from Tashkent, studied at the University of Cincinnati, and is a micro-biologist at New York University Medical Center. She raised two children, and her husband, Amnun, working in a factory and owning a shoe store, always helped with the children. “People are depressed while they're looking for a job,” she said. “Once things fall into place, they look at life differently and are more aware of civilized life. For the past ten years I've seen men more willing to take care of children, take them to school, and be aware of their discipline and how they're doing. Before, the man had his business and the woman took care of the children. Now the father gives a lot of attention to education and they are good to their wives.”

  Janash thinks the intimate, gossipy nature of Bukharan culture is serving to reduce the abuse problem, with people letting one another know that hitting a wife is unacceptable. “Women are more courageous and they take a step,” she said. “They don't suffer in silence anymore.” Still, Bukharan women often do not report assaults, fearing they will lose their husband to divorce or deportation, that he will take the children back to Central Asia, or that a scandal will make it difficult for the couple's children to marry. And many men still don't get it. Gloria Blumenthal, director of acculturation at the New York Association for New Americans, which helps immigrants find jobs and housing, recounted the time several Bukharan men sought her help in blocking the deportation of a friend accused of a crime against his wife. What was the crime? she asked. Rape, they said. When she refused to help, Blumenthal said, “they looked at me like I was crazy.”

  IN MANY WAYS, the Bukharans have it easy when compared with the multitudes of illegal Latino and East Asian immigrants who trek their way individually to New York for the kind of money they can't make back in their dysfunctional homelands. Many of these immigrants leave spouses and children behind, harboring the illusion that they will soon bring their families over to settle forever in America. But despite such technologies as videoconferencing, many illegal Latino migrants end up divorcing the wives or husbands they left behind, and they do so with such frequency that a cottage industry of divorce lawyers has cropped up. I glimpsed a sense of this in walking along Roosevelt Avenue—the spine of the nearby Jackson Heights neighborhood and a pulsing street shadowed by the elevated subway line that seems to exist merely to cater to the needs of immigrants. In the swarming montage of commercial signs, I noticed how often I would see signs for abogados—lawyers— followed by two words, inmigración and divorcios, that seemed to go hand in hand.

  Every year, tens of thousands of Latino immigrants tearfully kiss their spouses and children farewell and make their way to the American border, sneaking across or flying in on tourist visas they will probably let lapse. A study by the Department of Homeland Security estimated that in 2004 there were 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States, and that 3.6 million had simply overstayed their visas; only 4,164 of those overstay cases were ever investigated. The married Latino immigrants come here to secure gritty jobs because the wages, while small by American standards, go far when sent back home to support their children. The lowest-wage Mexican workers, for example, earn $4 a day; here they can earn two and three times that much per hour. The money is addictive. Although many immigrants come planning to remain a year or two, they often find themselves staying five and ten years as they come to realize that risking a journey home might mean never returning to the United States. Phone cards and videoconferencing keep some immigrants connected to their spouses, but others sense their husbands or wives back home becoming strangers. Some succumb to loneliness and meet lovers. Some seek out American citizens for sham marriages that they hope will lead to the brass ring of legal residency. Together all of these types provide more than enough business for the dozen or more divorce lawyers along Roosevelt Avenue.

  One of the busiest is Jesus J. Peña, a compact Cuban immigrant with dark, plush eyebrows and silver sideburns. He works out of the second floor of a squat two-story taxpayer building, and the blue awning trumpeting his services—“Abogados”—fairly touches the sides of the elevated subway. His office handles ten divorces a week, charging $900 for most.

  “The human race is a very optimistic race,” he told me, radiating the weary wisdom of a too-well-experienced man. “Everyone thinks they come to the United States and will make enough money to build a house and educate their kids and then they will go back. The first year they don't make enough money. The second year they don't make enough money. After fifteen years, they're still not making enough money and they're still here. You may find a girlfriend, and that's when you need a divorce.”

  Peña has seen so many quirky divorces that he has come to adopt a stoic shrug toward the parade of human schemes and illusions. He sighs at how often men with wives and children come here clandestinely at the risk of splintering families. When I stopped by, one of his clients was Rodolfo Rodriguez, a thirty-seven-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant. In Mexico, Rodriguez was earning $129 a week at a Nestlé yogurt plant in the Tlaxcala area east of Mexico City. He hugged his wife and six children good-bye, and with the help of a smuggler to whom he paid $1,500, he walked across the border and made his way to the Bronx. He found work as a packer at a Manhattan meat market, a job that paid $400 a week, and sent half his earnings like clockwork to his family in Tlaxcala. He came in to see Peña in the summer of 2005 because, despite his conscientiousness, his wife had divorced him the year before in Tlaxcala on grounds of abandonment. Rodriguez, round-faced with a black mustache and doleful brown eyes, was sent into a tailspin. “I was depressed, because when I came to this country, I thought I was doing the right thing by helping my family financially,” he told me through a translator.

  Nevertheless, he confided that he had found a Puerto Rican girlfriend that he was thinking of marrying. In fact, he was here to see Peña because he wanted to know what precisely was the status of his previous marriage. Although it may not be the case with Rodriguez, Puerto Ricans are prime prospects for immigrant remarriages because they speak Spanish and are citizens from birth. Peña told him the divorce was legal, and that he could remarry here. Although marrying an American citizen does not mean access to a green card for someone who entered illegally, as a practical matter immigration investigators seldom bother immigrants who have American spouses. Whatever he chooses to do, Rodriguez let me know that immigration has left a bitter taste in his mouth and he would so warn his countrymen. “If you have something valuable such as a family, I would tell them not to come.”

  Even when long-distance separation is not an issue, the pressures of immigration—the vulnerability of a spouse who is not a citizen, the isolation from family—can destroy a relationship, and in some cases, the breakups are accompanied by the kind of violent abuse that echoes the Bukharan problem. Dorchen A. Leidholdt, director of the legal center at Sanctuary for Families, a citywide organization that provides shelter and counseling for female abuse victims, said 85 percent of her clients were immigrants who endure beatings and humiliation because of their uncertain status. She introduced me to Dujuan Zhang, a winsome twenty-four-year-old who came in May 2005 from Guangdong Province on a fiancée visa to marry a Queens dentist, a naturalized American citizen who had met her on a trip to China. Zhang told me how her husband first hit her on the
ir wedding night and how he thwarted her from familiarizing herself with American culture, never teaching her how to ride the subway or giving her money for shopping. When she asked to take English classes, he accused her of trying to meet other men. When she suggested that she work in his clinic, he hurled a heavy backpack at her.

  The following July he punched her in the stomach with a closed fist and swatted her with a shoe. In pain, she furtively phoned a friend and had her call the police, who took her to a hospital and arrested her husband. When I spoke to Zhang, her husband was facing prosecution in Queens and she was living in a shelter. But Zhang is still worried because she is here alone and now is illegal to boot. Her visa has expired and her husband has refused to file the paperwork that would give her a conditional green card as his spouse. Leidholdt was petitioning to get Zhang residency as a battered woman who made a good-faith marriage. Still, Zhang was nervous about her future. “My husband is rich, and he's a citizen of America,” she told me. “I'm an immigrant from China. I don't have any money. I don't have any relatives here.”

  In her anguished isolation, she embodied the deep loneliness of so many immigrants, a loneliness that explains why changing countries is so traumatic and why it must be noted that expatriation is almost never Hollywood's romanticized idyll. If more Americans understood this, they would not be so quick to support harsh roundups and deportations for people who come here, however illegitimately, just to earn a living.

  REGO PARK (AND FOREST HILLS)

  WHERE TO GO

  Bukharian Jewish Center (SYNAGOGUE AND CULTURAL CENTER AND SEAT OF CHIEF RABBI ITZHAK YEHOSHUA) 106-16 70TH AVENUE, OFF QUEENS BOULEVARD, FOREST HILLS; (718) 520-1111

  Bukharian Jewish Museum (COLLECTION OF 2,000 PIECES ON HOME AND RELIGIOUS LIFE) 65-05 WOODHAVEN BOULEVARD, REGO PARK; BY APPOINTMENT ONLY; CONTACT ARON ARONOV AT (212) 898-4135

  WHERE TO EAT

  Beautiful Bukhara (A BAKERY THAT ALSO SELLS EMBROIDERED CAFTANS) 64-47 108TH STREET, FOREST HILLS; (718) 275-2220

  Da Mikelle II (BUKHARAN RESTAURANT AND BANQUET HALL) 102-39 QUEENS BOULEVARD, FOREST HILLS; (718) 997-6166

  International T. K. Gourmet (BUKHARAN MARKET) 97-28 63RD ROAD, REGO PARK; (718) 896-0617

  King David (WHITE-TABLECLOTH BUKHARAN RESTAURANT) 1010-10 QUEENS BOULEVARD, FOREST HILLS; (718) 896-7686

  Tandoori (BUKHARAN RESTAURANT THAT SELLS ITS OWN BREAD) 99-04 63RD ROAD, REGO PARK; (718) 897-1071

  Chapter 12

  Shifting Sands on the Grand Concourse

  FOR THE STRIVERS WHO MOVED THERE IN THE 1940S AND '50S, the Grand Concourse was their Champs-Élysées, a broad boulevard of Art Deco and other stylishly sedate apartment buildings that filled their craving for modest touches of class such as sunken living rooms, marble-tiled lobbies, even uniformed doormen. It was the height of petit bourgeois living in the Bronx and often derided as such by their children—this writer included. But for people weary of two wars and a Depression, living on the Concourse was a chance at modest graciousness and respectability, a statement of having arrived at a comfortable perch, with other, higher perches still in the distance.

  Those sunken living rooms were occupied by postal workers, locksmiths, bureaucrats, teachers, shopkeepers, even local doctors and lawyers. To a teenager, the residents seemed to flaunt a smug delight in having arrived on the Concourse, and nothing seemed to capture their complacency more than the ritual of hauling out folding chairs on a mild afternoon or evening, setting up on the sidewalk, and reviewing the passing parade. Distinctions of status were calibrated by what synagogue one belonged to, the Conservative temple or the Orthodox shtiebel, whether you went for the summer to a hotel, a bungalow colony, or just the Bronx's own Orchard Beach, whether you ate in the deli or ventured to a Manhattan restaurant. But whatever one-upsmanship there was, all was apparent harmony on the High Holidays, when every Jewish family would cram as if by command into four-block-long Joyce Kilmer Park near Yankee Stadium and show off their Sunday-best finery and their children.

  Except for a handful of flinty survivors, those residents are long gone. While Robert Caro in his landmark biography of Robert Moses blamed the demise of the middle-class Concourse on the gash in the neighborhood produced by the Cross Bronx Expressway's construction in the late 1950s and 1960s, I would argue that what happened had a more complicated dynamic. Residents of the streets radiating off the Concourse had already begun leaving slowly in the 1950s, and left more quickly in the 1960s, snatching at the next step up the ladder of success—a house in the newly tamed wilderness of northern Queens or even Westchester or Long Island. Meanwhile the humbler streets far to the east and the west of the Concourse in neighborhoods including East Tremont, Highbridge, and Morrisania were turning over, as Jews, Irish, and Italians were giving up tenements and ramshackle wood-frame houses for fancier apartments, and black and Puerto Rican strivers were taking their place.

  With each passing year, those waves of racial change lapped closer and closer to the Concourse. Then apartments started going begging on the Concourse itself, sometimes because tenants moved to Florida but sometimes because the children of those bred on the Concourse wanted to move away—to the electricity of Manhattan or to the comforts of the burgeoning suburbs. Landlords found it easy to fill buildings with referrals from the city's welfare department, most of them black and Latino families for whom landing on the boulevard seemed a stroke of good fortune. The blending of newly bourgeois whites and poorer blacks and Spanish speakers did not take—it happens easily almost nowhere— particularly because too many of the newcomers had the kinds of problems the Jews and Irish had come to the Concourse to escape. Their new neighbors made them uncomfortable, and they never gave them a chance to defy expectations, lumping the good families together with the bad. Then too the schools that had turned out college-bound Americans as if on an assembly line were losing their best students and declining, unable to solve the riddles of working with children from fractured homes. The moment that I knew life was changing in my bland neighborhood was when my mother found a tall man standing just inside the door of our unlocked fifth-floor apartment claiming he was looking for a Mrs. Goldberg. This intruder was black, and his bewildering presence in a building that was almost entirely Jewish raised my mother's suspicions. We rustled the man out and my mother urged me to call the police.

  “He was looking for Mrs. Goldberg's apartment,” I said, siding with the intruder.

  But sure enough, that night, while I was at the movies with my mother in our local movie theater, the Kent, my father suddenly appeared in the aisle with a look of alarm that seemed to glow in the dark. We had a boarder living with us in a small room right near the door— like more than a few families, we took in boarders to satisfy the rent— and my father told us that the boarder had come home and discovered that watches and jewelry had been taken from his night table. My Concourse innocence was shattered.

  There were enough incidents of muggings, burglaries, and plain thuggish behavior to accelerate the exodus. Jews, who always keep a metaphorical suitcase packed, fled en masse. Year by year during the late 1960s and '70s, I noticed that the High Holiday crowds in the park were growing thinner. When Co-op City opened in the swamps in the northern Bronx, with its lure of bargain-basement home ownership, the crowds in Joyce Kilmer Park vanished. One by one the European bakeries, pastrami-slicing delis, and kosher butchers closed. The Concourse Plaza, outside whose door my brother and I would sometimes wait to spy a resident Yankee baseball player, became a welfare hotel. With membership plummeting, rabbis handed the keys to their synagogues over to Baptist and Pentecostal churchmen, who retained the Mogen Davids and arched tablets carved into the stonework, letting them remain like pentimenti of a lost time. A deep slump settled over the boulevard, with one or two buildings succumbing to the abandonment sweeping across the southern Bronx.

  But the avenue has come back. Mayor Edward I. Koch put his mind to getting the city to fix up empty buildings it had been warehousing and to putting up
new buildings on the lots of brush and trash. By 2005, the city owned fewer than fifty abandoned buildings in the Bronx, where it had once owned more than a thousand. The Concourse is now bustling with new breeds of immigrants who also see the Grand Concourse as their boulevard of dreams and appreciate those same lingering, if tattered, touches of Art Deco elegance, even if they have wholly different outlooks on how they should be preserved. Dominicans have moved up from Washington Heights, Albanians and Cambodians fleeing wars and persecution have found refuge in the Concourse's northern end, and there has even come a more exotic strain than the Bronx is accustomed to—West Africans from Ghana and Nigeria. All probably are feeling the same heady sense of ascendancy, of having climbed from steerage to at least cabin level, that the Jews, Irish, and Italians felt when they first came to this airy boulevard and its decorous houses.

  It is the Ghanaians who have planted an entire novel culture into this spine of the Bronx, with their lilting accents, spicy foods, chromatic kente cloth clothing, tribal facial cuts, and uncommon mores, none more odd than their twist on the timeless yearning of new Americans for owning a house. When Ghanaians immigrate here, they too save up to buy a house, but the house they yearn to own is in Ghana. These Ghanaians, some of them living pinched lives as taxi drivers and nursing home aides, may never actually return to Ghana to live. But that is where they want to locate the concrete trophy that declares they have arrived. Beyond the standard rationales that people use to buy so remote a house—a good investment or haven for retirement—there is one explanation that speaks volumes about the city's growing Ghanaian population: “You can own a home here, but no one's going to know about it, so you have to own a home in Ghana,” said Kwasi Amoafo, vice president of Ghana Homes. “Then everyone who matters to you can see you've made it in America.”