New York Final Destination

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The shtetl atmospherics are thick in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood, home to a majority of the several thousand Russian immigrants, most of them Jewish, who arrive each year. Near the boardwalk, babushkas at a swing set push grandchildren, while over at the M&I International food store, women who spent last summer in Odessa this summer buy kapchonka (dried fish), Yugoslavian black-currant syrup and Borjouri seltzer water direct from Soviet Georgia. El Mundo III in Jackson Heights is one of the city's 6,500 bodegas, tiny mama-y-papa Hispanic grocery stores that sell fresh coconuts and plantains, yucca and 10-lb. bags of rice, instant masa from Venezuela or Colombian figs in syrup. Compared with the big chain stores, bodegas are expensive but friendly, loose, Latin. "If you needed five cents," says the Cuban owner of a bodega on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, "the A&P wouldn't give it to you. Here, our customers are like family."

There are now large ghettos within ghettos. Haitians, about half of them in the U.S. illegally, are concentrated in the heart of Brooklyn's black area in a quarter they call La Saline, after the Port au Prince neighborhood from which many came. Hand-lettered French signs are pasted on walls and hung uncertainly from storefronts. Creole patois burbles everywhere. One hot afternoon on Nostrand Avenue recently, the Impeccable barber shop was crowded. Men had gathered under the fans for companionship, a bit of gossip, not haircuts. "We Haitians love to get together," says the owner of a neighborhood restaurant. "We talk about Haiti, about Papa Doc. New York is a tough city, very tough. But here you have freedom, and that is what we Haitians need." Indeed so: the man did not want his name used, he said, for fear of retaliation from Haitian government agents.

Immigrants reweave bits and pieces of native culture, and counterculture, into the New York fabric. On Manhattan's Second Avenue are the offices of the Ukrainian National Liberation Front. In Brighton Beach, the best seller at the Black Sea bookstore is a Russian translation of The kgb Today. The pastor of a church in Queens says he figured that one new congregant, a woman who constantly glanced over her shoulder, was deranged. "It turns out she is a Soviet refugee terrified of the secret police," says the minister.

No group seems more churchly than the Koreans, devout Protestants in Asia and now devout Protestants in New York. In Elmhurst alone they have established at least four churches. The Indian population in Queens, settled for decades and now 25,000 strong, has an elaborate cultural center-cum-Hindu temple in Flushing, complete with domes and sculpted elephants. One day in May, Kari and Shanthi Naidu were worshiping at the altar of Sri Mahalaksai, a god of well- being. They had paid a Hindu priest $5 for a prayer service. "Quite frankly," says Kari Naidu, "I did not become a believer until I arrived in this country. But here, away from home, I recognized there is something more important than daily affairs."