help Arsirii enroll her daughter in
school. But pieces of the puzzle were
still missing.
‘‘I know that health care is very
expensive here,’’ she told me. ‘‘But
I don’t know how it works. I know
there are organizations to help. But
what organizations? It’s the informa-
tion that is important — and where
to get the information. Information
is crucial.’’
Arsirii had long dreamed of
coming to the United States under
diff erent circumstances. She would
have liked to walk around the city, to
take its measure and decide whether
it was the place for her. ‘‘There is a
very specifi c rhythm here,’’ she said.
In Ukraine, she explained, people
have more time to talk. She would
get home from work and have tea
with friends. Her daughter could
play in a central courtyard while she
occasionally checked in from her
apartment window. ‘‘Here, we are
getting used to another rhythm,’’ she
said. ‘‘Everything is moving quickly,
quickly, quickly.’’
She spends her days cooking and
cleaning to help her parents. She
follows the news from Ukraine and
worries about her brother, who is still
there. Without the papers to enroll
in school, her daughter is getting
bored. Her parents — one a home
health-aide worker and the other in
construction — found a two-room
apartment through a local broker that
they can aff ord. In that way, Arsirii
said, she has been lucky. She and her
daughter will have a little more space.
Arsirii would like to contribute to
the household expenses but is wait-
ing to hear about her work permit.
She hopes to work in an offi ce but
knows she will have to learn English
fi rst. Her days are spent in relative
isolation. She has painted her nails
blue and yellow, in honor of Ukraine.
She is waiting, mostly, for her new
life to start.No one knows exactly how many
Ukrainians have arrived in the city
since the war started in February.
But the incoming fl ow of people can,
in some ways, be measured by the
overwhelming number of requests
made to neighborhood and civic
organizations. When the Shorefront
Y in Brighton Beach scheduled an
information session for Ukrainian
immigrants, 300 people signed up in
advance, and many more came onmillion. Makhnin received six months
of assistance from the association as
well as a Pell Grant, which helped
her attend business classes. She has
been running the Business Improve-
ment District for nearly 20 years.
‘‘When I first came to Brigh-
ton Beach, there were the Amer-
ican-born babushkas,’’ Makhnin
said. ‘‘There were a few stores whose
owners and relatives came over in
the 1940s. Those stores were like
clubs.’’ Makhnin’s babushkas spoke
Yiddish to everyone who arrived,
off ering them advice and helping
them understand their new home.
The neighborhood has changed
since then. The babushkas are long
gone, and Makhnin wishes new
immigrants had the same level of
support. ‘‘I came diff erently,’’ she said.
‘‘I came as a refugee. We had NYANA.
NYANA provided English classes;
NYANA provided some fi nancial
help. I was in a diff erent category.
When they took us as refugees, they
took upon themselves some kind of
responsibility.’’ The arrivals Makhnin
sees today are staying with friends
and family members, packed in small
apartments, unsure of how to build
new lives. ‘‘What is next?’’ she asked
me, raising her eyebrows.
Makhnin is among a growing
number of community volunteers
struggling to fi ll the needs of the
city’s most recent arrivals. Anya
Shvetsova started Communities for
Ukrainian Refugees in March with
her mother, Yuliya Zolotarevsky, who
works at the Brooklyn Public Library.
Zolotarevsky had noticed Ukrainian
immigrants coming into her library
branch, looking for information on
housing, on health care and on their
immigration status, asking her ques-
tions she couldn’t answer. The group
has been working to place Ukrainians
with host families with spare rooms
so they can have some privacy from
the strangers who are housing them.
A network started by Temple
Sinai of Roslyn and the Islamic Cen-
ter of Long Island, called Upholding
Humanity, is doing the same thing for
families in Long Island and Queens.
‘‘One volunteer will bring a micro-
wave; one will bring a rug — hun-
dreds of volunteers will bring one
thing at a time,’’ said Ilana Schachter,
a rabbi at the temple. Isma Chaudhry,the day of the event. Michael Levitis,
a local Russian-language radio per-
sonality on Freedom FM 104.7, has
been hosting call-in programs with
immigration lawyers. Schools and
day care centers have been working
to open spots for Ukrainian children.
In a cubicle located in the back of
the Brighton Beach Chase Bank build-
ing, along Brighton Beach Avenue, a
woman named Yelena Makhnin has
been fi elding an endless stream of
requests since early March. Makh-
nin is head of the Brighton Beach
Business Improvement District. ‘‘I
am a referral service, let’s put it this
way,’’ she told me. ‘‘Everyone has my
cellphone number.’’
Makhnin, who was born in
Ukraine, arrived in New York in
1992 speaking little English. She took
classes at the New York Association
for New Americans (NYANA), a ref-
ugee-resettlement agency that was
founded in 1949 to serve Jewish refu-
gees, funded with a mix of donations
and federal grants. NYANA earned
near mythic status for those who
arrived in the 1980s and ’90s. In its
heyday, the association was serving
more than 50,000 immigrants a year
and had an operating budget of $90↑The couple in Rochester before their move to the Bronx. Photographs by Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times P. 51