One of New York City’s most exciting assets is its ability to transport people to new worlds for the price of a subway ride. Brighton Beach is one of those worlds. Also called Little Odessa, a reference to the Ukrainian city from which many of its residents hail, the Brooklyn neighborhood is known for its tight-knit, Russian-speaking community and the colorful shops, food emporiums and restaurants (much of their signage in Cyrillic) that line Brighton Beach Avenue beneath the rumble of the elevated subway lines. Once a beach getaway for wealthy New Yorkers, the neighborhood saw its first influx of Jewish immigrants—a number of them Holocaust survivors—in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s; a second wave began when the Soviet Union relaxed its emigration policy in the late 1970s and continued through its eventual dissolution in the ’90s. Georgians, Armenians, Uzbekistanis and many other groups from the former Soviet Union have settled here as well, their knowledge of Russian continuing to operate as a common bond.
