The Russian immigration of the past 20 years she adds is the most successful migration in the history of the United States

The Russian immigration of the past 20 years, she adds, is the most successful migration in the history of the United States.On a sunny weekend in early spring, the boardwalk is crowded. The young are easily acculturated; for the middle-aged the going is tougher. Most of these people are professionals, she explains, college educated. They don't want to take a job behind a counter -always supposing such a job is available. They think of assistance as entitlement; they want to wait for a job that matches their sense of self Meanwhile, they feel a little lost, a little frightened Let them get on their feet, then ask them about America. The visitor is taken aback but persists: What in particular disappointed you? "Everything." Most of the students nod vigorously.

Those few who shake their heads do so, it seems, less in disagreement than in disapproval of a lapse in manners.Bilus is not bothered by this response She has heard it all before Ask them again in two or three years, she says. It is an uphill struggle that is, she says, meeting with some small success, but most of the refugees are as uninterested in and as suspicious of those who proselytise for Jewish Orthodoxy as they are of the Jews for Jesus, an organisation that is trying a flanking attack.A visitor asks a question of students in an English language class at the Y: What most surprised you about America? At first, there is silence, then a gaunt man of middle age raises his hand "Disappointment," he says. A chain-smoking woman of immense compassion, good humour, and fierce energy, Bilus focuses her attention on what she calls "the two Js" - Jews and jobs. By Jews, she means the reclamation for Judaism of Jews who were separated from their religion by 70 years of life in an atheist state.

And so Little Odessa came into being, its numbers growing with a steady stream of new refugees every year.The Russian refugees, uprooted and bewildered, are helped all along the way by a host of agencies and acronyms, some governmental or government- affiliated but most Jewish, among them the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA). HIAS, the migration arm of the North American Jewish Community, is responsible for moving refugees from Russia and other member states of the former Soviet Union to the United States. Those refugees who end up in New York are resettled by NYANA. For the first few months after their arrival, NYANA provides newcomers with a wide range of essential services: health, housing, education, language instruction, the acquisition of Social Security cards, employment, acculturation, and so on. Each family has its own case worker - each interview is eased by the presence of a translator.Those refugees who settle in Brighton Beach are additionally fortunate in coming under the aegis of Pauline Bilus, a lifelong resident of the area, who runs Project Ari (Action for Russian Immigrants - the word ari in Hebrew means "lion") from the Shorefront YM-YWCA.

Project Ari co-ordinates its activities with the myriad agencies and sub-agencies involved in resettlement, fine-tunes their services, and leads the Brighton Beach refugees safely through the bureaucratic labyrinths. Housing was becoming available in a stable Jewish community newly rescued from the downward slide to slums and decay. As the numbers of refugees swelled in the late Seventies and again in the late Eighties, this first generation of Brighton Beach Jews, the immigrants of the Thirties and Forties, were retiring to Florida or to old people's homes, their children, upwardly mobile, having long since left. The boardwalk and the sands were still there, still crowded in the summer, but Brighton Beach became primarily residential, ceding the entertainment of day-trippers largely to Coney Island.

Eastern European immigrants moved in from elsewhere in the city, in particular Jews from Russia and Poland.In the early Seventies, when the first trickle of refugees arrived from what was still the Soviet Union, they had in their possession the names and addresses, long and lovingly preserved, of relatives who had settled in Brighton Beach three or four decades earlier. The building of single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings went on apace, creating what is to this day the area's essential housing stock. Then, too, with the teeming centre of New York only a subway-ride away, it became feasible to live all year in Brighton Beach. For a nickel, the poor could now leave their steaming tenements and sweatshops for a day of fresh sea air, food stands, and tawdry amusements. Holidaymakers, among them Jews excluded from the ritzier Manhattan Beach to the east, arrived by steamboat or by the new extension to the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad.In the Thirties, the arrival of the elevated subway opened up Brighton Beach to the many. By the first decade of the present century, Brighton Beach had a music hall and a casino. Summer cottages, rented by the season, sprouted on new land- fill sites.