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Consecutive Weeks

New Lives For Soviet Jews
Spark Brighton Beach Revival

STEVEN PRESSMAN

Special to The Jewish News

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32

FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1989

B

righton Beach — It is
a busy Friday after-
noon for Simon
Feldman as he stands at the
cash register and greets
customers who are streaming
into his White Acacia Super-
market on Brooklyn's
Brighton Beach Avenue.
The customers fill their
baskets not only with bread,
milk and eggs, but also with
smoked fish and pickled ap-
ples, kielbasa and plastic bot-
tles of dark brown "kvass," a
sweetened soft drink with just
a hint of alcohol. A take-out
stand at the cramped market
serves up steaming hot
"piroshkis," which taste like
spicy potato knishes.
Spread across the glass-
encased deli counter are
hand-printed signs that iden-
tify the array of cheese,
chicken dishes, pastries and
half-dozen or so salamis that
hang above. All the signs are
in Cyrillic, making it impossi-
ble for someone unfamiliar
with the Russian alphabet to
tell one delicacy from an-
other. Hardly a word of
English can be heard in the
conversations that waft
among the market's narrow
aisles.
Feldman offers a cup of
"kvass" and a piping hot
"piroshki" to a visitor as he
pauses for a moment from his
duties at the cash register.
Normally, he remains at the
market until ten in the even-
ing, but tonight there is a
family bar mitzvah to attend
so he plans to leave early. He
reflects on what has happen-
ed to the neighborhood in
which he has lived for 15
years.
"I really do believe this is
like a brand new life," he says.
"It's another beginning for
Brighton Beach."
Of course, Feldman could
just as easily be talking about
so many of the new Russian
immigrants who have settled
in Brighton Beach and other
nearby neighborhoods after
leaving places like Kiev,
Odessa and Moscow. For they,

Steven Pressman is a
freelance writer, now based in
San Francisco. This article
was made possible by a grant
from The Fund For
Journalism on Jewish Life, a
project of the CRB
Foundation of Montreal,
Canada. Any views expressed
are solely those of the author.

too, have launched into new
lives and fresh beginnings.
In doing so, they have con-
tributed as much to their new
community as they have
received from it. Longtime
Brighton Beach residents are
quick to credit the Russian
immigrants with restoring a
much-needed vitality to the
area. "There's no question
that they have saved our
neighborhood," says Pauline
Bilus, who directs the Action
for Russian Immigrants (ARI)
project at the Shorefront
YMHA in Brighton Beach.
"Now, we can walk the streets
at night. We can walk on the
boardwalk."
Once a fading waterfront
neighborhood, Brighton
Beach has been transformed
into a thriving "Little
Odessa" thanks to an influx
of some 30,000 Soviet Jews
who have been settling in the
area since the early 1970s.
With news of a large increase
in Soviet Jewish emigration
this year, Brighton Beach
may soon become "Big
Odessa."
Earlier in the century,
another wave of Jewish im-
migrants from Eastern
Europe and Russia washed
over Brighton Beach. Neil
Simon's Brighton Beach
Memoirs painted a nostalgic
picture of life in those inno-
cent years before World War
II. But just as Simon's fic-
tional alter ego Eugene
Jerome left behind his
boyhood home, so did many
others in real life. As a
younger generation moved
away, what remained was an
empty boardwalk and an ag-
ing population.
Today, a walk around
Brighton Beach offers plenty
of reminders that the com-
munity is back on its feet.
Joggers and strollers can be
found again on the boardwalk
that connects Brighton to the
hot dog stands and carnival
rides of Coney Island.
Along congested Brighton
Beach Avenue, Korean fruit
and vegetable grocers can be
overheard exchanging a few
words of Russian or Yiddish
with their customers. At one
end of the street, in the
shadows of the overhead train
tracks, stands the Black Sea
Book Shop that features a
large selection of Russian
language books.
About half of the businesses
in Brighton Beach are owned
by Russian Jews. The crowds
out on this Friday afternoon
seem to indicate that

business is pretty good. Every
so often, the bustling street
sounds are drowned out by a
deafening roar of the train on
the tracks above. Alexander
Sirotin, a Russian writer and
actor who emigrated to
Brighton Beach in 1979,
shouts above the din: "In
Moscow, there is a joke. We
would call this a moment of
silence."
Elsewhere on the street,
small groups of women
pushing baby carriages are
talking animatedly in Rus-

"They were
expecting us to be
Orthodox. But we
came here,. and we
were very different
form their
grandparents.
Maybe they were
expecting a bunch
of religious tailors
and shoemakers."

sian. A line is forming at the
six-screen movie theater near
the corner of Brighton Beach
and Coney Island avenues. A
half-dozen or so video stores
offer current American films
along with some Russian-
language movies.
Still, despite the signs of ac-
tivity, it would be a mistake
to look at Brighton Beach as
an unqualified success as far
as the resettlement of
thousands of Soviet Jews are
concerned. Instead, there are
deep-seated frustrations and
mounting social problems
bubbling just beneath the
surface.
Ironically, the frustration
stems directly from the
vigorous campaign waged for
years by American Jews to
pressure the Soviet Union in-
to allowing more Jewish
migration out of that country.
No sooner had that campaign
first begun to bear fruit when
many American Jews sudden-
ly realized that most of the
new emigres were not what
they had expected.
The new arrivals, for the
most part, hardly resembled
any of rIbvye's villagers from
Fiddler on the Roof These
were neither the Talmud-
quoting peddlers nor Sharan-
sky clones who suddenly spill-
ed into Brooklyn with their
strange language and
customs. Instead, they were
engineers and teachers, fac-
tory workers and writers , —

