The Next Stop Is: Brighton Beach

I love our Little Odessa because it is the closest approximation to a home I will never really know.

The disembodied MTA voice announces like a polite yet melodramatic phantom. Slam! My sister slaps shut the book she’s reading. She tugs on my wrist to drag me out of the cool air-conditioned subway car and into the sweltering Brooklyn heat.

Under the elevated railways, a bustling neighborhood stands at attention. Cyrillic and English lettering line the restaurant signs and storefronts. Food vendors brave the summer humidity to sell their wares of pirozhki and chebureki. No stranger to immigrants, the community has been built throughout the decades by waves of Eastern European newcomers, many Jewish refugees who came here after World War II, and then again after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For decades, the neighborhood of Brighton Beach has long been a refuge for persecuted intellectuals, gangsters, revolutionaries, and working-class families alike. It’s not surprising in New York, where someone could live on one street for their whole life, and just by walking a few blocks over enter a whole new micro-country with its own sets of rules and customs.

On the streets of Little Odessa, the flowing consonants of Russian stream past my bilingual ears, some sticking while others fall away in a watery rush of sounds. The serpentine trains rumble overhead as they come and leave, slithering out of the station, roaring like the metal dragons they are. The streets are covered in their shadows, making Brighton a well-lit cave with gaps of patterned light that fall between the tracks. The locals walk like they always do, quick-footed with intention, sidestepping while never looking each other in the eye. I walk this way too, always on my way somewhere else. But some impulse hijacks my system. For a second, I stay in place to take another look.

How many times have I come here? I wonder. Walking these blocks with my sister, each lined with food stores, nail salons, and pharmacies, since apparently Russians have an endless need for caviar, fresh manicures, and valerianka. Stopping by the Brighton Beach branch of the library, filling our bookbags with as many graphic novels as we could, reading on the beach while the sun baked our dark hair and grits of sand dug into the skin of our elbows. Going to the Master Theater—or, as we used to call it, the Millennium Theater—with our parents, watching graceful ballerinas, eloquent violinists, and sad Russian clowns grace the stage.

And honestly that might be the epitome of Brighton Beach, a mixture of the foreign and familiar, the loveable and ridiculous. Beyond the way it smells like all urban streets do in summer, a literal hot mess of garbage and rotting vegetables sitting on the curbside, there’s something endearing to find here if you know the neighborhood well enough. Like the gourmet food store where they sell roasted corn nuts, lollipops shaped like roosters, and Turkish delight. Or the lingerie store where Mama dragged me to get a new bra or swimsuit (I can’t remember which), and the plump saleswoman barged past the flimsy red curtain, inquiring about the size, despite my squawks to keep it closed, because she, like all the other Russian aunties I know, had no sense of privacy. Or the St. Petersburg Bookstore, which—in addition to selling texts in a language I can barely read—peddles gorgeously hand-painted matryoshka, knockoff imperial eggs, blue-and-white porcelain cups, Russian magnets made in China, and Putin calendars, and no, you did not misread that last one.

And its people. The place is made of so many people, of chain-smokers and nagging grandmothers and stubborn assholes, who are so wonderfully drawn that they could be stock characters in a play if they weren’t so painfully real. Like the old men who play chess on the boardwalk, or the babushkas who gracefully stroll down the sidewalks with their canes and walkers, their orthopedic shoes and silk scarves. Or the pharmacists who all seem to know Mama, the nurse, by name, smiling at her in the way only stoic Russians smile—not like the West’s for sake of polite courtesy, but for those for whom they actually mean it, those they recognize as their own.

But mostly, I love Brighton Beach, our Little Odessa, because it is the closest approximation to a home I will never really know.

As someone born and raised in Brooklyn, I have no memory of the place where my parents formed their first memories, took their first breaths. I have no recollection of summers spent at dachas in the countryside, no knowledge of the skies where Baba Yaga flies in a mortar and pestle, or the woods where deathless immortals and houses with chicken legs roam. I only have the stories my family tells me and my sister, curtly-spoken and sepia-colored, distorted by their own experiences of growing up in a land that treated them as second-class. Of my babushka who rushed home hiding the Passover matzah she got from the synagogue so no one would hunt her down for being a Jew. Or of my mama, who was rejected from a university where one administrator asked why she even bothered applying, her last name marking her as the outsider she would always be had she stayed.

I love Brighton Beach, our Little Odessa, because it is the closest approximation to a home I will never really know.

In these stories, they tell me to be grateful that I’m American, while telling me in the same breath I will never really be Slavic, reminding me I will always float in the small space, the hyphen in between. In Brighton, I have the room to be openly Jewish in ways they could never be. Yet I also know this place that is home to so many émigrés is also not equally welcoming to all members of its diaspora.

I know the stories of the Russian and Urkanian LGBT asylum seekers who hesitate to step into Brighton Beach, a neighborhood full of the same kind of people they escaped from. They fear those who also immigrated here, bringing with them all the elements of their shared culture, including their prejudices. As someone who is queer and Slavic myself, I stand at a tricky intersection: privileged with my American passport, yet still afraid to hold a non-male partner’s hand here, to be judged by the people who look and sound so much like the members of my own family.

Looking at the crowd of people on the street, a familiar ache tears through me. There’s a knowledge that part of this place, part of its history, belongs to me, if only by virtue of my blood. Yet even that percentage feels negligible, as though the biological connection to this place would disappear with my family, leaving me a stranger in this imitation of a country. As I stand there beneath the rumbling tracks, the disparity of myself, young and liberal, against a sea of pale, conservative faces only seems that much starker, the distance between myself and my family that much wider.

“Oy!”

My head snaps toward my sister, who has an impatient look on her face. Without another word she pulls my hand, dragging me away from my reverie. I hop a little, trying not to lose a sandal in matching her brisk pace, as we walk out from beneath the shadows of the subway tracks and into the burning light.