My sense of identity stems from the apartment building I grew up in. In the heart of Midwood, what I affectionately call “Jewish Brooklyn,” not far from the Q train, and a fifteen minute walk from the school I attended from the ages of five to fourteen. My first home, located on the fifth floor of a six-story building, had two bedrooms. In one, my parents and I slept, and in the other, my two brothers and grandfather (Dedushka).
What I remember of it is spare, barely a fragment at this point, but I recall the texture of the peeling walls, the open space in the living room (though I imagine it is much smaller than I remember it). I remember the 80s TV with the flimsy antennas, the VHS tapes of Russian and American cartoons, the peacock-patterned bed sheet, and the large pillow my grandfather slept on. I remember my parents’ mattress – sharp with springs – and their bedframe that left countless splinters on my fingers, arms, and legs. And I remember the black leather chair that my parents would hide family heirlooms and cash in.
Admittedly, I don’t remember much from my childhood, or from my first home. We only lived there until I was eight, until we moved to an apartment in the same building on the second floor. For months it was such a foreign place; I felt anxious rubbing my hands on its walls. But it was the first time anyone in my family had their own bedroom since migrating to America.
In every sense, that apartment functioned as a diverse community of its own: it was made up of multigenerational, multilingual, multicultural inhabitants. Dedushka, for instance, was born in 1923 and grew up during the Second World War. He kept memories and traumas with him at all times. My father and mother, who were born into a war-torn Soviet Nalchik, spoke Juhuru and English. My two brothers, who left the Soviet Union at ages three and five and for whom fog served as the remnant of memory, speak Russian with a semi-Americanized accent. And me, the very latest edition to our family unit: the only American-born, the only daughter, and the one for whom the Soviet Union and Nalchik were a reproduced memory – who only had access to the old country from stories and scraps of language being passed around.
Our furniture reflected this multicultural ecosystem: our chairs, table, and beds all belonged to neighbors – were fished out from the garbage – and carried their own stories, their own memories, and remnants of their previous owners’ bodies. It was a surreal thing, knowing that everything we ever had existed within a liminal space. In Nalchik and not quite in Nalchik. In the Soviet Union and not quite there, either. And surprisingly, in America and not yet crossing the cultural (and linguistic) threshold.
America was not quite mine growing up, but it was more mine than it was anyone else’s in my family. Those apartments (both on the second and fifth floor) and building collaged collective stories, the ones that couldn’t be outrun or escaped. The elderly Ukrainian women sitting in their walkers outside the building became like my adoptive grandmothers. Russian was the first language I spoke, and now the words sound funny on my tongue. Language and memory function similarly in that way. They’re the first to go. I barely remember looking at my grandfather for the last time. I’ve almost entirely forgotten the sound and cadence of his voice.
Because the physical community surrounding my childhood home (Brooklyn’s Ave N and East 12th Street) was primarily comprised of Orthodox American Jews, I felt that our apartment building stuck out like a sore thumb. For starters, it was one of the only buildings on the block, and its residents were also quite dissimilar from the others. Aside from not being American or speaking English, the building’s residents weren’t religious, either – having fled a region where religion was not free to exercise and where antisemitism ran rampant.
Over time, as my family began to change internally, the building started changing as well. My eldest brother went to Yeshiva, brought the rules of Shabbos and Halacha, the Jewish law, into our home. My Mom would adopt that language, customs, and holidays. She would bring food to our neighbors every Friday night for years, and made me start joining her as I grew older. It became expected. We knew everyone’s name, knew where everyone lived. Our next door neighbor in our second apartment, Jena, brought me birthday presents every year. The neighbor directly below us, Janice, complained about noise and shared stories about her estranged daughter.
Some of those neighbors are still alive, but the ecosystem has changed. Baba Anya, whom I always hugged when seeing, died several years ago. She lived just a few doors down. When Dedushka died, we avoided his room entirely. His ghost no longer wanders around there; all traces of him are gone. Only memories and photographs remain. One of the building’s residents, an older man I saw from time to time, looked just like my grandfather. Whenever I passed him in the hallway, I remembered my grandfather’s face.
We no longer live in the apartment – that building on Ave N is no longer my community. My childhood school has since been torn down and a luxury apartment complex exists in its place. The store I used to purchase my Yeshiva uniform from is now a weed dispensary. Most things remain the same, however: the corner store fully-Kosher grocery stores, the 7/11 a few blocks down, the Kosher restaurants lining the block, the bakery my father’s cousin works at.
I passed by the building just yesterday, dropping off some clothes at the seamstress across the street from where I grew up. Red bricks decorate the building. The courtyard outside where all the elderly ladies used to sit is vast and empty. The numerical address is written out in gold lettering: 1414. From the thick glass doors, one can see the murals that local Russian artists painted when I was eight.
The people who made my childhood meaningful slipped away, only their memory survives, and I miss it all terribly. I will always see the apartment(s), the building, and its residents, as home.
