“Brighton Beach is just like SoHo,” asserts Kira Melamed, 19. Then she abruptly pauses, and reconsiders. “Well, it’s like SoHo broken into a million pieces – instead of lots of people out at night, we have a few drunks wandering around.”

Before her friend Yelena Mandenberg, also 19, can get a word in, Kira adds with urgency, “You know that there’s a schizo living on Brighton 13th Street?” Her eyes, outlined in electric blue eye shadow, gaze towards the street where she says the schizophrenic man lives. She lowers her voice: “It’s crazy here.”

Kira was born in Moscow; Yelena in Ukraine. But both grew up in the heavily Russian Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach.

They say things like: “I love Brighton, but I hate Russian food and Russian people.”

And, “I love Russians and hate them at the same time.”

And, “I plan to never, ever move, but I hope this neighborhood keeps changing.”

They’ve come of age in a culture established by their grandparents, immigrants from Russia who rarely assimilated. While these teens aren’t about to disavow their Russian heritage, as many of their grandparents seem to fear they will, they feud with their Russian grandparents, whom they see as stuck in their ways.

“The grandmas here are insane,” Kira says, shaking her head.

“I Don’t Remember Why I Loved Russia”

Brighton Beach developed into a neighborhood of second-generation Americans in the 1950s; it was populated by the sons and daughters of Nazi concentration camp survivors. Back then, quirky mom-and-pop shops lined the main drag, Brighton Beach Boulevard, and the mile-long boardwalk along the beach was a popular weekend destination. Drugs and crime spiked in the 1960s, as in many other New York neighborhoods. But as the former Soviet Union relaxed its lockhold on emigration in the 1970s, thousands of Soviet Jews settled in Brighton, reinvigorating the neighborhood. The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 brought another immigrant wave.

Yelena and Kira came with their parents and grandparents in the post-Soviet wave. Kira was 9; Yelena just 2 1/2.

Kira found the transition especially difficult.

“I felt so lonely and misunderstood because I was so different, and it was hard to make friends at first,” Kira recalled. She struggled to learn the American language, and trying to fall in love with a place that seemed so different from Moscow.

“I was upset to come to America; I wanted to keep as much Russia in me as I could,” she said. “But I don’t remember why I loved Russia because, looking from the outside, there isn’t much to love.” She grew up in a loving, well-to-do family, but knows that many of her compatriots in Russia did not. “I miss that perfect time in my life, which happened to be there,” she said.

While both girls have adapted to New York, much of the older generation still struggles to fit in, and, especially as Kira and Yelena see it, to let go of the communist mindset. Young Russian-Americans think their grandparents cling too closely to a culture thousands of miles away.

The Grandma Connection

Even though Brighton Beach is the logical place to retain and nurture Russian culture, the neighborhood is homogenizing. Americanization seems to be threatening the Russian cultural enclave the families of Kira and Yelena came to find. Starbucks and Walgreens stand out on Brighton Beach Avenue. Many of the Russian grocers and restaurants Yelena and Kira remember from their childhoods have disappeared. “One of the only places that hasn’t changed is Jack’s Hairstyling for Men,” Yelena said, of a tiny barbershop tucked in next to an organic food market (and she didn’t know if Jack’s was even Russian). But there’s distinct sense of kinship too, in a neighborhood where mothers live a few blocks away from daughters, and everyone seems busy meddling in somebody else’s business.

The ties between grandchildren and grandparents are especially strong. Andrew Rekheis, 22, a volunteer at a local Russian-Jewish community center, asserts: “For Russian families, there is no such thing as a babysitter. Parents usually have children at a young age, and your grandparents raise you.”