When I went to see “Anora,” I was dimly aware that the movie — filmed in my childhood neighborhood of Brighton Beach, with large swaths of dialogue taking place in my native Russian — would hit close to home. But I wasn’t prepared for how moving it would be to see an award-winning film made about one of the working class, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods of New York that I associate with representing the grittiness and authenticity of my city and home.
The movie follows Anora (Mikey Madison), an Uzbek-American stripper who strikes gold when Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, offers her a lucrative escort deal. In the ensuing two hours, as the audience follows Anora’s desire for love and acceptance, her struggles with her identity, her desperation for an expedited ticket out of her life’s circumstances, I sat locked in, tears gathering in my eyes.
I don’t ever lose sight of my heritage and its indelible impact on shaping my identity, but I often lose contact. I can go weeks at a time speaking no Russian. When I first moved to a wealthier part of Brooklyn a few years post-college, I went months without visiting home. I often thought of the Russian-Jewish neighborhood I grew up in as a prologue from which I’d graduated to the main story arc of my life. I’d assimilated into a career, neighborhood, lifestyle and relationships that were conducive to me often forgetting that the Russian-Jewish parts of my identity existed. I was proud to be a native New Yorker, but tended to keep my upbringing vague. When Ivan peppered Anora with questions about how she can fluently understand Russian while she wanted to avoid details and repeatedly preferred to be called Ani, I immediately empathized. Growing up as the first-born, first-generation daughter of low-income Russian and Ukrainian Jewish refugees was something I also sometimes preferred to not elaborate on.
In truth, I’d never liked being a Russian Jew. I chafed at the repressed trauma and unacknowledged mental illnesses of all my elders, who had suffered through the worst of socialism and antisemitism in the Soviet Union, only to face hardships in late-in-life immigration. I felt uneasy growing up with Russians in the role of villains in American movies, at the abundance of unsolicited judgment and comparison that ran on an endless loop as the soundtrack to my life. I hated the misogyny, the homophobia and Islamophobia, the typecasting of other cultures, the food. I was tired of the gaudiness and flashiness, the corruption and superstitions. I squirmed at my grandpa crying when I left food uneaten, winced when people struggled with my father’s accent, hated my mom forcing us to eat the same dinner five nights in a row because money was tight. I suffered with the heaviness of knowing my parents had chosen a hard life so mine could be easy — and when it did become easier, returning to the reminders of what I had come from became even harder. I knew to hate it was to hate myself, but hate it I did.
Education posed my most realistic opportunity for social mobility, out of the bleakness I experienced daily. So when Anora went along with Ivan’s impulsive plans to get married in Vegas — barely containing her joy as she packed her possessions from the strip club, skipping a visit home altogether — I shared in her relief at getting granted her fresh start. When I got accepted to Stuyvesant for high school — an exam-based public school I’d wanted to attend since elementary school — I experienced an elation I rode for months. I counted down the days to starting school “in the city” and beginning my new life, leaving Russian Brooklyn behind.
I did eventually graduate from high school and university, and returned to New York — much to my chagrin, to my parents’ apartment — where I continued to feel pervasive unease at being steeped in both of my New York experiences simultaneously while not feeling like I belonged clearly in either world. The self-contained ecosystem of Russian Brooklyn rarely required visits into the city. As I forged deeper into my Manhattan career, I began feeling disillusioned that many of the people I encountered at work often had no exposure to the culturally rich outer borough experience. They were in their early twenties, indulging in the New York we’d all seen in movies: a glamorous, romantic whirlwind. And wasn’t that what Anora and I were seeking, too?
Seeing her half-asleep, riding the train to its final stop in our neighborhood, reminded me of the compartmentalization I’d maintained for years. It made me realize that my youthful idolization of Manhattan had resulted in my devaluation of my Brooklyn upbringing. Learning to hold and accept both halves of my experience, without casting one aside in preference of the other, was the only way to reconcile my cultural dysphoria. I felt some of that in Anora, when she reached her moment of reckoning that Ivan and his parents were terrible people that she had put on a pedestal without actually knowing. I cheered for her when she cast off their fancy clothes, rejecting them and standing on her own two feet.
Watching Anora felt cathartic because it authentically depicted the multicultural, immigrant experience of New York that I’d grown up wishing for years would be featured on the big screen. To me, the beauty of my city is in its preserved cultural and ethnic enclaves, the ethos of the “melting pot” metaphor coming to life. It’s one of the only places where newcomers can expect to settle within the safety of their own emigree communities and raise children that can then pursue dreams and realities that are possible nowhere else. Immigrant children who then grow up like me and Anora — forced to reconcile the dualities of our nature and our nurture, our desires with our opportunities, our past and our present. Who struggle with our gut instincts to shroud the parts of ourselves we are most ashamed of in darkness, when acceptance of our whole selves can only come from bringing those parts into the light.
These days, having moved to a city with less prominent Russian-Jewish culture, I sometimes overhear a Russian conversation and inch closer, yearning to hear more; or the notes of a Jewish folk song I grew up hearing float into my consciousness; or the English language lacks the exact word for how I know I feel in Russian — and it feels like a slumbering part of me comes rearing to life, laid to rest but close to the surface, angling for acknowledgement. I catch myself adhering to a silly superstition, or suddenly missing an ethnic dish I haven’t eaten in ages. I think back to a time when I was surrounded by friends who shared my culture, and how wholly seen I felt; the comfort of code switching, the depth of understanding.
For too long, I viewed the decades of my family’s struggles as a shameful weakness, when in truth it bolstered my resilience and served as the source of my strength. To have felt discomfort with my multicultural identity was to deny the complexity, depth and empathy my background had produced. And it’s only in seeing myself and some of my lived experiences in characters like Anora that I can come to appreciate how far I’ve come. That I can watch the screen fade to black, let my tears for her fall — but wipe them away, hold my head high and pray she finds the peace and acceptance that we all deserve.
