Brighton Beach

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At the very southern tip of Brooklyn, far from the hip avocado cafés and right before you hit the sea, there sits the neighborhood of Brighton Beach. Nicknamed ‘Little Odessa’ after the waterfront city in Ukraine, the area is home to primarily Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It’s a jumble of identity. The immigrants are mostly Jews from Ukraine, hence the nickname, but also Russia, Belarus and the other Soviet republics. So what to call these people in America? In Russia, in Ukraine, in Belarus, our identity cards never described us as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian. We were just Evrei, Jews.