The waiter sized us up for a slightly too-long moment as he asked for clarification, "the Russian vodka?" Yeah, of course, we nodded.
Of course. That's the overwhelming sentiment in Brighton Beach. The restaurant easily converted into a nightclub where gold lame is very unironically cool? Of course. The back room where old, Russian men who wear suits that command enough respect to overlook the obvious signs of wear wander in and out authoritatively? Of course. The young couple on the corner splitting a can of whipped cream in their matching acid-washed jeans? Of course.
Developed originally as a beach resort town, the residential streets still retain a facade of their old lives. Neatly packed rows of bungalows in shades of fading blues, yellows and greens make their way to the ocean. World War II brought a wave of immigration from the Soviet Union marked by a high percentage of Holocaust survivors, which has continued to attract more migration since then. So the beach side resort town got a metro stop and denser settlement. It got nightclubs, vodka, jewelry and fur stores, bakeries and a mix of populations all more or less united by the rule of the Russian language.
It's the perfect place to visit if, like me, you're not entirely sure where your family comes from in that historic mix of war and love, of borders and brides. I thought I would just look around for something that felt intuitively familiar. And in some strange ways, the slightly strained, worse-for-the-wear exotica of it did feel familiar.
The main drag running through Brighton Beach is store after store of what would seem to be nostalgizing tourist destinations meant to mystify and commodify the land and people behind the Iron Curtain. And yet, a few ventures down the side streets reveal more sushi and Chinese restaurants than old-country destinations, suggesting that those stores crammed with Russian pop CDs, romance novels and nesting dolls do not just serve the curious Manhattanite crowd. Maybe the aisles of what looks like art critic Clement Greenberg's 1939 understanding of 'kitsch,' serve some purpose to the Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Russian sons and daughters born a few generations shy of the world their parents once knew.
For Greenberg, "Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility (of the 'rear guard' or rural, recently turned urban and literate population). It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time."
As clearly patronizing as this ivory-tower, cultural-purity toting view is, it's hard not to feel that those discoballed nightclubs are just a 'vicarious experience' or 'faked sensation' of Western-style conspicuous consumption, or are just what the Soviet Union always imagined life in America to be like. But it's here, it's right here in Brighton Beach in America. Kitsch, for lack of a better word, always goes so far beyond what is assumed to be commodified. Instead of some imagined bacchanlia of Capitalistic ideals, the furs and the overly synthesized pop songs are a way to connect to what life was supposed to be like before migrating, what life really actually might still be.
I say it might still be the way things are because so much of the simulated glamor reminded me of growing up in the Midwest. Most of the Midwest was home to German and Scandinavian immigrants but many of the urban centers attracted Eastern European Jews from the late 1800s onward. Cleveland still has a substantial Eastern European Jewish community, including some of my own relatives. My father grew up there and brief visits have left an impression of a people who become accustomed to creating splendor out of very little. The home was always central to Judaism and it received all the care and attention it deserved. Meals were opportunities for prayer, no matter how simple the chicken, potato dumplings and wine. In places like this, people are still expected to dress nicely--not nicely in the New York City sense of a need to both assimilate and stand out by following the fashion cycles of mass production but nicely in the sense of your favorite suit jacket, the one you've been wearing every Friday for the past twenty years. When I saw those old, Russian men shuffling into the unlabeled back room in their suits that look like they were meant to indicate respectability but no real luxury or money, I saw my family back in Cleveland and I felt a little bit at home in what was otherwise a bizarrely isolated place.
So the discoball that starts to spin as the lights dim every night around 6pm isn't meant to make you feel you are somewhere you are not and it isn't meant to satisfy the tourists looking for Russian kitsch (though it does). It is meant to say, wealthy or not, waxing nostalgic or imagining yet unrealized desires, we are making a simple space worthy. Brighton Beach has to be an awful lot to be worthy of its inhabitants who have been ruthlessly cast about in the past. It doesn't always seem to add up to one cohesive sense of self, but if they ask you if you want the Russian vodka (both a symbol of elite quality and of a birthright to all those who grew up making their own family brand), just say "of course."
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