Bagels and Balalaikas

A vivid photographic portrait of Brighton Beach across more than forty years of immigration, memory, and change

In 1980, photographer Marcia Bricker Halperin was assigned through the federally funded CETA Artists’ Project to document Brighton Beach. Her knowledge of a bit of Yiddish helped lead to the assignment: recording a Brooklyn neighborhood being remade by the arrival of Soviet Jewish émigrés, who joined older Jewish residents in the seaside community known for its boardwalk, markets, and restorative ocean air.

Halperin’s photographs capture Brighton Beach at a turning point. Elderly residents gather on benches and sidewalks. Families shop, talk, and move through streets where familiar traditions meet the textures of late-twentieth-century New York. The work also carries a personal connection: the neighborhood recalled Halperin’s own Eastern European immigrant grandparents, who found comfort in the sea air and water.

Four decades later, during the pandemic, Halperin returned with her camera. The Brighton Beach she found was still recognizable but transformed. The neighborhood had become home to an intertwined Russian-speaking community, including immigrants from Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, as well as Central Asian Muslims. A caviar store with velvet ropes shared a block with discount stores. A Georgian flag flew beside an American one. Sidewalk displays, restaurants, markets, and the continuing rhythms of the boardwalk revealed a neighborhood in constant motion.

Bringing together color and black-and-white photographs from 1980 and 2020–2026, Bagels and Balalaikas offers an intimate record of change without reducing Brighton Beach to nostalgia. Halperin’s portraits and street scenes show how successive generations of immigrants have preserved traditions, adapted to new circumstances, and reshaped one of New York City’s most distinctive neighborhoods.

In an epilogue combining history and memoir, Gennady Estraikh, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, places the photographs within Brighton Beach’s long Jewish history. His account gives context to Halperin’s images of “Little Odessa” as both a remembered place and a living immigrant community.