Coming to America : Russian Jews Strive to Leave Home Behind

Ten years ago, Eugeny Bragarnik gave up on Soviet promises of a workers’ paradise to pursue the American dream.

Bragarnik started out as a cab driver. He now owns a restaurant and a three-bedroom house, drives an Audi, has a son in college, jogs five miles a day on a seaside boardwalk and loves “Three’s Company” reruns on cable.

He has little interest in Soviet upheaval, even if the communist monopoly of seven decades is ending: Lithuania leads restive republics seeking independence, Armenians war with Azerbaijanis, and Eastern Bloc tyrants have tumbled like the Berlin Wall.

“I don’t think about that government. It’s past. It’s gone,” said Bragarnik. “Everything I have is over here. My soul is here. Most of the time, I am thinking about this government.”

At Bragarnik’s Odessa Restaurant, nestled among the delis and fast-food joints typical of any American neighborhood, an eight-piece band featuring two Russian singers competes with the flat music of video games in the lobby.

Supper tables are set with shot glasses for gulping down icy Stolychnaya vodka, and patrons are welcomed by a spread worthy of an Old World wedding reception: borscht, shish kebab, cabbage-stuffed piroshki and pelmini, a spicy dish similar to ravoli.

The linking of East and West occurs throughout Brighton Beach, N.Y., a 25-block pocket of Brooklyn within commuting distance of the Statue of Liberty and adjacent to Coney Island’s roller coaster and parachute jump.

The neighborhood, the largest concentration of Russians in the United States, is called Little Odessa for the Black Sea port in the Ukraine where many of its residents once lived.

Brighton Beach’s newsstands boast the Cyrillic headlines of the only Russian-language daily newspaper in the Western Hemisphere, and newcomers tune in to Russian-language TV and radio shows.

The Black Sea Book Store carries Russian mysteries, novels and science fiction--but not Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s “ Perestroika ,” the Soviet president’s plan for overhauling the country.

The argot of Odessa, Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev can be heard among the clusters of people who visit the boardwalk, wearing fur hats and head scarves called babushkas.

Everything, it seems, has a Russian flavor except politics. These latter-day pilgrims are too busy chasing capitalistic prizes like TVs and cars to worry about riots in Tadzhikistan or long lines for toilet paper.

“Some people get homesick, but there is a new medicine for people who suffer from nostalgia,” said Sophie Spektor, who left Odessa for Brighton Beach 15 years ago. “It’s the $3,000 ticket. You go back and you become well in a hurry. You won’t be nostalgic anymore.”

Since 1972, when former President Richard M. Nixon’s policies of detente thawed Soviet-American relations, about 35,000 mostly Jewish refugees have come to Brighton Beach to flee hatred and bigotry. Most settle in plain, brick tenements that look as if they were stamped out by the same cookie cutter.

This year, more Soviet Jews than ever are coming to America. Gorbachev’s reforms made it easier for them to leave, but the open society is a doubled-edged sickle that made the Jews who remain targets of hatred and bigotry by some Russian nationalists.

“This is the largest wave ever of Soviet Jewish refugees in modern times. They are really running scared. As a group, they are a persecuted minority,” said Mark Handelman of the New York Assn. for New Americans, a resettlement agency that helps pay housing and living expenses.

Last year, 36,147 Soviet Jews were admitted to the United States, and 40,000 are expected this year, according to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. That’s up from 10,576 in 1988 and only 570 in 1985, Gorbachev’s first year in power.

About half the new arrivals stay in the New York area.

The 1.4 million Jews living in the Soviet Union fear pogroms, or organized racial attacks. Jews say biases prohibit them from holding government jobs, getting promotions or gaining admission to universities. For them, Lenin’s promise of a workers’ paradise is as empty as most Soviet stores’ shelves.

“There’s an ancient history of anti-Semitism. It’s in the mother’s milk of every Russian,” said Pauline Bilus, director of Action for Russian Immigrants, a service agency based in Brighton Beach.

“People are voting with their feet. They’re breaking the doors down to get out of there. There’s a palpable fear. You can touch it, taste it,” she said.

Svetlana Uriadko, who came here 13 years ago, said things seemed worse when she visited the Soviet Union in 1988.

“On the street, you can hear people yelling: ‘Jew, Jew, go out from the country.’ It’s intolerable,” Uriadko said. “There is nothing in the store. No cheese. No meat. No bologna. No wurst. No eggs. The people steal. They hoard. They have black markets.

“America gave me a second birth. Here, only here, I started believing in God,” she said. “Gorbachev is to be complimented for one thing. In the heart of communism, he pronounced communism doesn’t work. He tore off the false mask.”

Among the refugees, Gorbachev gets mixed reviews. They’re grateful he allows more Jews to leave, but many believe the reforms may be too late. Even the most cynical, though, concede the changes have gone too far to turn back.

The one-party rule dictated after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution has given way to multiparty elections. In a nod toward capitalism, factory ownership is allowed. Communist Party cards have been burned in freedom marches.

“Nobody expected in our lives there would be such changes,” said barber Abe Rud, 52, between $6 haircuts in his Brighton Beach shop.

“It’s gone too far,” Rud said. “It couldn’t go back. You would have to have a thousand, thousand tanks to turn it back. What are you going to do, kill people in the streets?”

Once settled in, these new Americans tend to be conservative in their politics and lifestyles.

“Most of them are Republicans,” said Pat Singer of the Brighton Neighborhood Assn. “They loved Reagan. They want toughness. They want someone to stand up to the Russians.”

Some traits die hard, especially when it comes to asking for government assistance for housing and food stamps.

“They know how to fight a bureaucracy. They never give up. They even bring crummy presents, like Russian perfume that smells like mothballs, to cut through the red tape,” said Ruth Paris of the Council of Jewish Organizations of Flatbush, N.Y.. “None of them has any love for Russia.”

Many sound like American parents fretting about drugs, crime and kids wearing wild clothes and too much makeup.

“They cannot accept laxity and the lack of discipline in schools,” said Rabbi Yechezkel Pikus of the Council of Jewish Organizations. “They feel you can get away with murder because the penal system is so ineffective.”

The new arrivals laugh about getting dizzy in American stores because their heads spin so fast trying to look at all the merchandise.

After chafing under a government that dictated everything, they must learn to take the initiative for the first time in their lives.

“People are not accustomed to making their own decisions,” said Helen Lomosova, who has been in the United States for less than a year. “The system was arranged so that somebody always told you what to do.”

Lomosova, 60, once taught English to pupils in the Ukraine; now she teaches English to refugees who squeeze into elementary school chairs at Public School No. 225.

She taps her toe to give rhythm and cadence to the strange words being mouthed by a nurse, a violinist and a sheet metal worker struggling to say their names, addresses and phone numbers in English.

“Only English is spoken here,” she tells them, in a tone that suggests a teacher’s admonitions are the same in any language. “Never say ‘cannot.’ Always say: ‘I’ll try’ or ‘I will.’ ”

Other lessons are more subliminal. Lomosova begins each class with the patriotic words of a cherished U.S. verse.

As the students say words they may not yet fully appreciate, she repeats the final line for emphasis: “God bless America, my home, sweet home.”