Brighton Beach Memoirs

New York is an “international” city.

Internationalism in Manhattan is not quite international. It’s better understood as a sect of its own, whose mores are formed by the great ports of the Atlantic. But in the more provincial outer boroughs of the city, one finds New York’s genuinely worldly enclaves—the sprawling Chinese quarter in Flushing, where one can sometimes walk a mile without hearing a word of English, instead of Manhattan’s Chinatown, where suburban colonists are steadily replacing the autochthonous Chinese; Bay Ridge, with its Nabulsi sweet shops whose patrons clamor around television sets blaring Arabic, instead of the Edward Said Library in Morningside Heights, stocked full of his collection of secondary sources in English and peopled by kaffiyeh-clad Arafat fans; Gravesend, home of the National Premier Soccer League’s Brooklyn Italians, instead of Little Italy, none of whose residents are Italian.

Something similar can be said of the post-Soviet community of Brighton Beach. It is increasingly safer to notice, especially in the wake of the war in Ukraine, that this “Russian” neighborhood is populated less by Great Russians than by regional and ethnic minorities of the Muskovite realm, people whose Russian passports were marked with ethnonational designations: an “Uzbek,” a “Hebrew,” a “Ukrainian.” If you want to encounter a Jew whose citizenship in a major center of the diaspora was recently qualified as Jewish, you must head south, past the Belt Parkway and toward Riegelmann Boardwalk.

At the borscht joints of deepest Brooklyn, one finds people who have witnessed the decline of one of the great 20th-century empires from the inside, from which they made their way to what seemed to be the great victor of the 20th century, the capital of liberalism and free markets—a country whose leaders are beginning to resemble Leonid Brezhnev more than they resemble LBJ and Ronald Reagan.

Much ink has been spilled about the sociological currents at play in the strange American reception of Arab revanchism in the wake of the Oct. 7 pogrom. Some time after the war began, I came across a contemptuous epithet for Tel Aviv attributed to the Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Grinberg. He called it “Odessa on the Mediterranean,” because he believed, in the first half of the 1900s, that the city’s pacifist establishment was vainly pursuing moderation in the conflict with Arab nationalism. By refusing to claim explicitly political rights, they were acting like any other “Jewish community,” rather than representatives of a people headed toward sovereign territorialization.

Having grown up near a third Odessa, “Little Odessa” of Brooklyn, I found this disorienting. The Little Odessans I grew up with, including relatives of mine who grew up in the Soviet Union, seemed … well, not pacifist—and not inclined to refuse political rights. I decided to go pay a visit to the old neighborhood.

The first person I visited was Svetlana Lifschutz, my great-uncle’s ex-wife, who grew up in Sokhumi, Georgia, in the 1960s. (According to Moscow, Sokhumi is the capital of a Muslim dependency of theirs called Abkhazia, rather than a city in Georgia—no one else seems to agree.)

Minutes into our conversation, I asked her about “the war,” which she misunderstood to be the one in Ukraine. “Why would I have an opinion about that stupid war?” she sneered. When I clarified that I wasn’t referring to the dueling Hetmanates of Kyiv and Muskovy, but to the situation in the Holy Land, she calmed down. “Ah yes,” she said. “I follow that closely, I watch Russian-language Israeli TV all the time.”

From her point of view, as a Jew and a Georgian, the Soviet Union was a machine of indolent ethnic Russian bureaucracy, an engine geared toward the repression of resourceful minorities—such as Jews, Georgians and Armenians—all under the cover of communist cant. “Growing up in Georgia, I never felt any discrimination,” she told me. “I only had one antisemitic teacher in high school. But when I aced my medical school exams, I spent a few years trying to get into different medical schools in Russia proper, but none of them would take me because of the Jewish quotas.” She left the Soviet Union in 1979.

Leonard Petlakh, a Jew from Belarus who now runs a chain of JCCs and Ys in south Brooklyn, notes that while the American second generation is more liberal and assimilated than their conservative parents, those parents have recently begun boasting to him about the dissenting stands taken by their liberal children against the institutionally imposed culture of pro-Arab orthodoxy at their fancy-schmancy universities. Some might argue that this is simply a function of the status of the Hebrew nationality in the Soviet Union, but Petlakh believes it can be traced to something deeper. “We were there when the Soviets invented most of the PLO slogans, starting from ‘imperial aggression’ all the way to ‘Zionist apartheid,’” he told me. “If, when I first arrived here—or even more recently—you told me these stories would one day become popular in America, I never would have believed you.”

Petlakh and I talked about the Brat (Brother) movies, directed by Aleksei Balabanov. Action comedies set in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Chicago, they are classics of post-Soviet chauvinism and ressentiment—Vladimir Putin has even used Brat references in his electoral campaigns. A Russian friend of mine, who considers herself post-national, once confided to me that she can’t help feeling like a patriot when she watches it—it’s a guilty pleasure. Brat’s hero, Danila, is a veteran of the Chechen war and a gangster with a heart of gold. Laced with contempt for Chechens, Ukrainians, Jews, and all Americans aside for the genial truck driver who gives Danila a ride out of New York, the films are raucously funny cousins of the Dirty Harry series. Yet once the hero’s bumbling older brother, en route to his mission of saving Russian women from lesbianism and exploitation at the hands of Chicago pimps (the twin fates of the average American woman, according to Brat), succeeds at swindling border control with his fake passport, he signals his contempt for the Amerikansky dupes by announcing “Free Angela Davis!”

To Petlakh, the Yasser Arafat and Angela Davis tropes were both goofy bluffs which he never imagined could possibly be taken seriously in the West. The cynicism with which these mantras were devised and employed in schools and in the media was obvious. “It’s hard for a Jew from the Soviet Union or from Iran to fall for such things,” he told me.

Lifschutz agrees. She remembers listening to unsanctioned broadcasts of Voice of America and Kol Israel in Sokhumi during the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967. Moscow condemned it as “rotten imperialism” and “aggression.” I ask her if people believed this and she is shocked. “We were jubilant, we all started clamoring to immigrate to Israel,” she recalled. I explained that I meant to ask about her non-Jewish neighbors. “Oh, perhaps some of the simpler goyim,” she said. “Educated people always knew you could never believe anything printed in Izvestia, there was always an angle. It’s not like here where the lies are taught by true believers who make their students feel like they have access to secret knowledge.”

In the past, I got the impression that to Lifschutz, American liberty at home—and its expression in the national polities which, in its heroic era, it championed abroad—represented a stark contrast with the Soviet Union, which she saw as a land of lies populated by statistics and quotas, rather than citizens.

In this discussion, though, I found her decidedly less sanguine. “America is a very different place than it was when I got here,” she said. “it took some time, but the oil powers really converted the West to the Arab cause, almost like the conversion of the descendants of destitute Arab DPs through the UNRWA camp system. You must understand, the current electorates of America and Europe are not composed of the same elements as they were 30 years ago—and their prejudices are very different from the old ones.”

She is intensely proud of the Russian community in Israel. “Look at them, they didn’t even know Hebrew when they arrived, yet in just a few decades they have founded businesses and are in all the professions—their kids serve in the army and they are loyal to their country,” she beamed. The one thing she told me makes her sad is the anti-religious tenor of Russian Israeli television.

Russians in Israel may still be patriotic without religion, but here in the states, Jewish identity among ex-Soviets is becoming more tied to religious experience. At the F.R.E.E. (Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe) near Neptune Avenue, I bumped into Alex, an ex-boxer (and he looks it) who was hunched over someone’s yahrzeit candle, lighting his cigarette. (That’s the kosher way to do it, because you can’t light a new flame on the holiday.) After chatting a bit, he took me to the Young Israel synagogue a few blocks away, where his favorite rabbi holds court.

“Before I met Rabbi Zaltzman,” Alex told me, “the only thing Jewish about me was the nationality entry on my Soviet passport.”

Ephraim Zaltzman grew up in the States, but his father was a famous figure in the underground Orthodox cell in Samarkand. He speaks English without an accent. The synagogue he runs is a fusion of Chabad and Young Israel; a large Israeli flag stands to the right of the Torah ark, while the prayer books all follow the Chabad arrangement of the liturgy—some with facing English translations, others with Russian translations. Alex made me don a kippah. Outside the sanctuary, men were playing chess and sipping tea.

Alex, who is in his 40s, was circumcised 15 years ago, after coming under the influence of Rabbi Zaltzman. “He told me the best time to do it is the week between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur—on Rosh Hashana I was uncircumcised and by Yom Kippur I was a different man,” Alex told me. Still, he has a dim view of Brighton Beach religiosity. He arrived in the States in 1992, as a teenager. “I remember when there were five Russian restaurants with kosher certification around here, now they are all treyf. This shul predates Rabbi Zaltzman, it’s very old. He saved it when the old-timers realized the youth were mostly leaving—they decided to allow Chabad to take over, otherwise it would probably become a mosque.”

Sitting next to us is a young Talmud student who grew up in Sumy, a Ukrainian city which has suffered heavy bombardment from Moscow’s troops. He runs a Released Time Jewish studies program for Chabad, catering to a public school not far from Young Israel. His appraisal of Brighton Beach religion is more optimistic. “We just started, so we only have about 20 kids from this school, but there are many more potential recruits, I can tell.” The two begin arguing in Russian and I take off to Oceanview Café for some vareniki.

According to Petlakh, they’re missing the point. “The post-Soviet Jewish community was never religious, nor were they ever highly affiliated with Jewish organizations.” Precisely because their Jewish identity had a national and political expression in the Soviet Union, most Jews did not resort to confessionalism. But he thinks the second generation, or at least those among them who will not assimilate completely, is more likely to engage with Judaism through religion than their parents. “I’m not religious, but one of my sons is now modern Orthodox. The other made aliyah.” And he sees a growing level of identification with Jewish causes among the youth, in ways peculiar to their Soviet heritage. “A friend of mine works for Hillel, and he runs Birthright Israel trips for the Hillel kids. All year he could never tell which kids are Russian and which aren’t, but once he got to Israel, he immediately began hearing sounds of recognition in Russian—they began seeing their grandmas everywhere.”