ON wintry nights in Manhattan, little bands of smokers huddle under restaurant awnings, shivering as they struggle to light their cigarettes in the icy wind. You will not find them outside many of the Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach. Here, smokers simply stay inside. They may wait a bit longer before lighting up, and they …
FOR those lacking cab-ride entertainment since television screens were discontinued in taxis in 2003, there is hope. It comes in the form of Oleg Roitman, aka the Human Computer, an immigrant cabdriver from Ukraine who regales fares with a flashy sleight of mind: Give Mr. Roitman any date – say, your birthday – and within …
LAST Sunday, as photographers gathered in front of the Millennium Theater on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn, a muscular man in a bulletproof vest dramatically hoisted a cardboard box full of ostensibly illegal DVD copies of the Russian-American spy thriller ”Nelegal” (”Illegal”), a film that was having its U.S. premiere that night. ”Oleg, your hat, …
MILA GORBATOFF, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who fled the rampant anti-Semitism in Ukraine in 1988, lights a menorah every Hanukkah to commemorate her bond to a previously forbidden faith and the new freedoms that made it possible. After Hanukkah ends, another fixture of the holiday landscape appears in the living room of her apartment in Brighton …
What does it mean to be from a place that is no longer on the map? My homeland, the Soviet Union, disintegrated in late 1991, a scant three years after my family had managed to escape its anti-Semitism and lack of opportunity. As an immigrant in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with a funny haircut and even funnier …
‘Where Is Home, If the Place You Come From No Longer Exists?’ Read More »
