The Russian Jews have come and they want to get married...
An Immigrant Group in a Rush to Marry Young
Published: December 13, 2004
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/nyregion/13bride.html

As a girl growing up in Ukraine, Galit Galak wove macramé and dreamed of wedding dresses, the kind measured in kilometers of satin.

After five years spent studying design in Israel, Ms. Galak, 33, moved to New York and opened a bridal shop in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, where she began making dresses as big and engineered as any painted by Fragonard. Her own occasion to wear such a garment came when she married another Ukrainian, who proposed after an appraisal period of 10 days.

Opening a bridal store in one of New York's Russian-speaking neighborhoods is, it turns out, about as risky as erecting a surf shop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Among the wave of newcomers to the United States since the late 1960's, Russian-speaking women appear to be the likeliest to marry of all.

By the time they turn 40, only 4 percent of women born in Russia or one of the other former Soviet republics have never married, compared with 15 percent for all women in that age group in the United States. Even among other ethnic groups, they stand out, with a rate of never-married women that is less than half that of foreign-born Chinese and a third that of foreign-born Hispanics, according to an analysis of 2000 census data for The New York Times.

By age 40, Russian-speaking women in the United States have higher rates of divorce than all other major groups of female immigrants, according to the 2000 census, but that may just reflect their higher rate of marriage.

Russian-speaking women in the United States also seem inclined to marry at a younger age than most. A continuing study, the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York, begun in 1998, found that Russian Jewish women ages 18 to 32 married earlier than any other group of women surveyed. Half were married by age 22. (National census data for 2003 shows the average age for a woman's first marriage was 25.3)

Although most women who immigrated from the former Soviet Union from the 1970's through 1990's were Jewish, experts in that group's immigration say the pattern of early marriage is attributable to cultural family patterns that transcend religious beliefs, and is thus likely to extend to all Russian-speaking immigrants. They tend to follow the example of their parents, many of whom married in their early 20's.

Alla Farber-McEntee, 33, who arrived in Brooklyn with her family in 1981 as a 10-year-old from the republic of Belarus, said: "I think in general, Russian families are very close, and older generations help out younger ones and thus the younger ones are highly influenced by their parents and even grandparents."

In contrast to contemporary American culture, where marriage at too young an age is viewed as irresponsible, "marriage in this community is generally considered a good thing, especially if it is to someone seen as a quote-unquote good guy," said Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida, an assistant professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who has studied Russian immigrants in New York.

"The community really does promote it," said Esther Leviev, speaking of early marriages. Ms. Leviev grew up in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn after her family immigrated from Uzbekistan in 1987; she will marry next month at the age of 20. Her fiancé, also from Borough Park, is 21. The couple met through friends and became engaged one month later. "Seventeen would be considered too young, but if you were 26 and not married people would wonder why," Ms. Leviev said.

At Marie Shall, another wedding dress shop with a largely Russian clientele, the owner, Marina Shalyakhova, said the oldest bride she ever had was 30.

The decision to marry early may also be rooted in a cultural aversion to protracted dating. Ms. Farber-McEntee said, "You start dating a Russian and things progress pretty quickly." Russian men, her sister Elizabeth Kravtsova said, "just don't have the commitment issues American men do."

The focus on marriage in the Russian-speaking community explains a curious entrepreneurial gambit: a magazine called Russian Bride of New York. Founded this year by a hairdresser named Alex Aranbaev, who immigrated to the United States from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the bilingual magazine (circulation 60,000) exists as a kind of Martha Stewart Weddings for young women of Soviet heritage. There are more than 200,000 such single women in the United States, over a quarter of them in the New York metropolitan area. Mr. Aranbaev envisioned a magazine that would interpret American wedding rituals while at the same time promote the preservation of Russian tastes.

The fall issue encourages the purchase of bridal gowns from Russian purveyors in the outer boroughs and taking honeymoons in the Seychelles or Fiji - destinations that would allow readers, the editors make note, to follow the examples of Michelle Pfeiffer and Bill Gates.

Featured as well is a short instructional explaining just what a cake should look like in the American marriage celebration. "A traditional wedding cake is white and pink in color and has a number of layers," the editors wrote. "The design can be anything you want, ranging from a lady's hat to an elephant or an automobile."

Ms. Leviev realizes that her decision to marry at 20 is unusual by American standards. Her Jewish American friends at Yeshiva University, where she is a student, do not believe in getting married before they have finished their degrees, she has observed. Even her parents had hoped she would defer marriage until after graduation, but Ms. Leviev did not see the point. On the dating habits of young Russians, she said: "Your attitude is that you are doing it for a higher purpose. A lot of people in the American community seem to date so that they have something to talk about with a friend at dinner."

"If you are going out with someone for two years and you haven't figured out some integral part of the relationship and you're not sure and you don't know, then you shouldn't be together."

Ms. Farber-McEntee said she believed that foreshortened periods of dating had much to do with a mind-set entrenched in a relatively more goal-oriented approach to life. "As early as high school because of our 'Russian mentality' we tend to date more seriously, looking at every boyfriend as possible husband material - rather than casually dating, without considering the future," she said in an e-mail message.

Weddings themselves in the Russian-speaking world, one quickly learns from a glance at Russian Bride, are not occasions for a lily-of-the-valley brand of minimalism.

A few weeks ago, Tali Arabov, 21, and Avi Levy, 22, held their 500-person wedding - a size typical in the Russian-speaking community - at the Crest Hollow Country Club in Woodbury, N.Y. The cocktail hour, which preceded the ceremony, included a vast pasta bar and an offering of sushi in a miniature gondola.

Serving as master of ceremonies was Yuhan Benyaminov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan who has given himself the stage name Yunan Benjamin and has become the most sought-after wedding singer in Russian-speaking New York. Before the service was conducted he announced the entrance of every member of the bride and groom's extended family ("Let's hear it for Molly and Yakov!"), and then, ultimately, the rabbi, as if the rabbi were Elton John making an unscheduled appearance at Royal Albert Hall.

Registries and gifts of blenders or fish knives are unheard of at a Russian wedding. The receptions themselves are often paid for in large part by the community, Mr. Aranbaev said, meaning that guests know to bring an envelope with a sum of money equal to the cost of the per-plate price at a particular catering hall or restaurant.

The ambivalent attitudes toward assimilation that pervade Russian Bride remain apparent in many aspects of young Russian life. The Second Generation project found that young Russians tended to stay close to home for college, typically living with parents through the undergraduate years and until marriage, while those from other immigrant groups ventured farther away.

Although young Russian women living in the United States remain intensely tied to the world of their elders, they are also marrying outside their ethnicity more than young women from any other large immigrant group, analysis from the 2000 census conducted for this article indicated. More than 25 percent of women 18 to 40 years old born in Russia or one of the other former Soviet republics have been marrying outside their Russian- and Soviet-émigré community.

Explaining this, Philip Kasinitz, a director of the Second Generation project and a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said that it is often more important for Russian Jews to marry within the Jewish faith than it is within the Russian world.

Others speculate that young Russian women may marry outside their community because they received a poor view of Russian unions as they played out during the Soviet era. "Alcoholism and sexual infidelity were encouraged in the culture of the Soviet Union," said Tony Carnes, a sociologist at Columbia and a director of the Research Institute for New Americans. "Many of those marriages were not exclusive. A single woman who is here may have seen some of that and wanted to find stable partnership without going into the Russian context."

On the day after Thanksgiving at Galit Couture, Ms. Galak's shop, Monica Polakov, 29, a Ukrainian who grew up in Great Neck, readied herself for her coming wedding to an Englishman. Her mother, Galina, looked on adoringly as she stepped into her corseted gown. Still, Mrs. Polakov said, she wished that her daughter had found cause to wear it a good few years sooner.

- posted by Izak @ 3:13 AM