Doing the field work for this project was actually quite fun and interesting. I do not live far from Brighton Beach and am there almost every day regardless of the project, so it was nice to experience it with all my senses instead of just speed walking through the streets to get to my destination of the bus, train, or store. Before we began the project I knew how Brighton operated.
I knew that that the streets were filled with grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants, cafes, “piroshki” stands, and the boardwalk was occupied over the winter with polar bear swimmers and over the warmer months with families and the elderly. Living so close to the area and being a daily part of the atmosphere put me at an advantage; I knew what Brighton Beach, who inhabited it, and how it was a thriving Slavic neighborhood. Instead of changing my views on the area, it only enhanced what I previously thought about Brighton Beach. The people can be rude, but the atmosphere is still inviting, especially for someone that speaks Russian or another one of the many Slavic languages prevalent in Brighton.
I consider myself a Russian Jew. My mother immigrated from St.Petersburg, Russia and my father immigrated from Kiev, Ukraine. Although they came from two different countries, both of my parents and their families are Jewish and had a similar upbringing due to the umbrella of communism in the U.S.S.R. These experiences bonded the when they met in New York and also bonded many of the immigrants who settled in Brighton Beach. 72.2% of residents that live in Brighton are foreign born (city-data.com) and many of them came from countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Belarussia, and all other previously U.S.S.R. countries.“They were all Soviet citizens: the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks. Russian language was their connection. The reason they come here, to Brighton Beach, is that Russian still ties them together.”(forward.com- The Changing Face of Brighton Beach)
My parents eventually moved into the house we live in now, and we are not very far away from Brighton but I am happy that we do not live directly there. The B and Q trains are always running, buses run down all of Brighton, the beach gets noisy over the summer, and the people can be very rude. Although I identify as being a Russian Jew, I can not fully identify with being a “true Russian”. One article takes a different take on Brighton, instead of seeing it as a little Russia or Odessa “What you’re actually getting is a kind of double-blind guess— a Jewish immigrant’s idea of what an American’s idea of Russia may be,” (nymag.com) but I do not agree with this because we saw many people who were evidently not Jewish and got overall rude reaction from them. Stereotypically, Russians are known to be rude, cold, uncomfortable to be around, drunkards that came from tiny villages in Russia and are not educated. This is the total opposite of my family; everyone has a college degree, if we indulge in alcohol it would be wine, and we have warm auras that attract people instead of turning them away. Not to say that all of Brighton Beach is like this – it isn’t – but people can be nasty. We were turned away for interviews, rudely addressed when conducting surveys, and workers in the stores usually don’t want to be there and will be rude to you if you take more than a second to think about what you want. On the other hand, many people did help us out in our journey to discover what country they came from or interviews about their past, but to us, it seemed like only a small percent were willing to comply.
While getting the raw data we needed for our final field notes, I got to really focus on certain senses. I picked sight and sound. Truthfully, being a musician, I can find sound in almost everything. For me, walking around and listening to Brighton was a pleasant experience. Even though I have excellent eyesight, I used a different type of vision and had the opportunity to observe people milling around their day without being a part of the crowd. I saw and heard what I expected, a busy, primarily Russian-speaking street in Southern Brooklyn that has families and elderly that need food and medicine and good company to get through their lives. Because I live in this proximity, this was no surprise to me because my family does many of the same things. We go shopping on Brighton, I go for walks along the boardwalk year-round, I visit my grandmother who lives in a building there, and I even manage to get to the beach on a hot summer day. I understand this way of life as it is my own.
Doing this project, taking pictures, and forming the website gave me more of a connection to Brighton. I feel even more involved in my neighborhood and know more about its history, food stores, and inhabitants. My group decided to make one of our themes on comparisons of the old Brighton Beach and how it is today. This was very interesting for me because going on the hunt for these pictures and seeing similarities of streets and buildings that I see every day was an experience if its own. Many of the pictures I found were illustrations instead of camera images. For example, “the Brighton Beach Baths, was an enormous private club where members could swim, access a private beach, and play handball, mah-jongg, and cards.” (theweeklynabe.com) This was near the present day Oceana buildings, closer to the ocean, so we did a side by side comparison of the illustration and the buildings that are there today. We looked through old photos and saw how some of the pictures we took matched up with similar angles and also did the side by side picture comparisons. A lot has changed on Brighton since 1860 when it began developing, and we took a small part of that and incorporated it into what we wanted to show people when they went on our web site.
Although I enjoyed going to Brighton with my group partners, I also enjoyed being able to go by myself and truly enjoy the experience. I got lucky that I was there April 10th as the weather was amazing and I got to conduct an interview. Instead of focusing on getting pictures, sound bites, and trying to find things to match up with our senses, I was able to have my enjoyable experience and then retrieve everything I wanted from it. This just goes to show that with all the negative that can be said about on area, it can still be a delight, especially when the focus is on enjoying yourself rather than solely exploring an area to do well on a project. It is a bias of its own because you are looking for specific things but thanks to the amazing evening I had, I was able to write a good field note because I got to experience everything and pick exactly what I wanted to focus on; there was no bias on my part. I value being able to look at things objectively but because I pretty much live so close to what I was reporting on, there was definitely some insider bias. I just hope that the bias was helpful rather than harmful and showed more of a truth than if an outsider were to analyze it. Through this project, I was able to get a deeper understanding of Brighton Beach but I’m also happy that now I can connect to the neighborhood even more and that I saw it for what it is; some nasty people but some good food and a great boardwalk to make up for it.
