Fairfax West

Ed Edison flies in four times a year from his Honolulu home to shop a small slice of Pico Boulevard on the Westside.

“Shopping here is like going to the market in Tehran,” the 52-year-old Iranian American said during a recent trip. “There, people shop daily at the fairs and run into relatives. Same thing here.”

The stretch of Pico between Roxbury Drive and La Cienega Boulevard is the newest--and certainly most populous--incarnation of Los Angeles’ ethnic Jewish base. It draws ethnic Jews from throughout the region and nearby states.

In contrast to its better-known counterpart, Fairfax Avenue, which consists largely of older, Eastern European Jews, West Pico is populated largely by younger Middle Easterners. It is also chock full of supermarkets, including Little Jerusalem, Kotlar’s Market and Pico Glatt Market, a kosher establishment.

Largest of all is the 15,000-square-foot Elat Market, which sells a mix of ethnic foodstuffs such as Persian basil (sweeter than its American counterpart), Israeli pickles (from Mexico) and Middle Eastern pita breads.

Amid a cacophony of Middle Eastern languages and Persian music, the Elat’s daily specials are often advertised first in Arabic, then in English.

“Between Pico and Fairfax, it’s the great divide, two different sides of town, two totally different crowds,” says Madeleine Rosenberg, who has lived near Pico for the last 26 years. “Pico has the more yuppie Orthodox crowd, the major Jewish schools,” she said.

Pico also has not one but two Young Israel synagogues, and a host of young professionals who strayed from their religion then rediscovered it, Rosenberg said.

It wasn’t always so. Back in the 1930s, when the city’s ethnic Jewish heart still lay in East Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights, West Pico Boulevard was decidedly middle American.

When a post-World War II slew of Russian Jewish immigrants settled around Fairfax Avenue, however, the city’s Jewish base moved westward, said Harry Blitstein, a 58-year-old painter who grew up on Fairfax and is now a board member of that street’s Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative program.

Fairfax’s ascension was cemented when Canter’s Deli moved from Boyle Heights in 1948. “That was the signal to the rest of the [Jewish] community,” he said.

But increasingly, local merchants acknowledge, Fairfax is living on its past.

“A lot of people show up from the Valley in miniskirts, shop quickly and leave even quicker,” said Arnold Herr, owner of Arnold Herr Books, who said his store is now “surviving off the Internet.”

Meanwhile, West Pico Boulevard has become increasingly popular, fed by an influx of Persian Jews in the wake of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran after the 1979 revolution. The Persian Jewish community, in turn, has attracted other Middle Easterners.

Former Israeli Dalia Baruch, who lives in Studio City, is one of them.

Baruch shops at her local Ralphs supermarket every other day, but says it cannot satisfy her yen for something closer to her soul.

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And so, once a week, she goes to West Pico--not merely for the spices or the fenogric greens that give a Middle Eastern stew its flavor or even for the flat barbari bread. She also comes for the feel and sound of her former homeland.

So does Elizabeth Kashani, a 21-year-old UCLA student who on a recent day was picking through boxes of strawberries, discarding the spoiled ones and putting the rest in her shopping cart, the way she did in Iranian markets seven years ago.

Kashani knows that pickiness would be frowned upon in a mainstream American supermarket, so she drives here twice a week.

With customers coming from so many directions, the Elat Market has grown more than 15-fold in 15 years, said 35-year-old co-owner Ray Golbari.

As the market and neighborhood have flourished, so has the rest of the street.

Five years ago, when Mike Ben Moshe, 40, was looking for a place to locate his kosher Shalom Pizza, he studied sites on both Fairfax Avenue and Pico.

“Fairfax is dead,” he said. “Here, it’s alive.”

The pizzeria stocks circulars written exclusively in Arabic in the belief that if you have to ask for a translation, you shouldn’t be here.

Meat market owner Farjolleh Yadkarin, 51, tried three locations in six years on Fairfax. Then two years ago he took out a $100,000 loan and moved his F & Y Kosher Meat Market to West Pico.

On Fairfax, he said, “I went broke. Now, business is decent. Not good, but decent.”

A year and a half ago, the area even got its first Persian Muslim supermarket, the Zafar. Persian American manager Seye Mahmoudi, 23, says the kosher requirements are the same in both Muslim and Jewish religions, and the Middle Eastern tastes are the same. “So why not?”

Still, some think West Pico has gotten too mainstream, too (dare we say it?) American.

“Too crowded, too pushy,” said former Israeli shopper Baruch. “ I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to.”

Of course, she said with a sigh, “I’m an American now. So here I am.”