Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

5 The House of Open Arms: FILIPP AND RAYA KATZ IN BATH BEACH, BROOKLYN (February 7, 2010)

3 7 5 The House of Open Arms Filipp and Raya Katz in Bath Beach, Brooklyn fEBRUARy 7, 20 10 Filipp and Raya Katz, Russian émigrés, who live in a split-level house in Bath Beach, Brooklyn. (Kirsten Luce for The New York Times) 3 8 The journey that brought Filipp and Raya Katz to the red-brick and beige-stone house that Ms. Katz calls “my little palace” began more than half a century ago in the Ukrainian city of Mukachevo, near the Hungarian border. The Katzes grew up on the same street, not far from the river that runs through the city, and they knew each other as children. A sorrowful bond was the fact that all four of their parents had been Holocaust survivors. Their story resumed two decades later in Israel. Mr. Katz, who by then had immigrated to the United States, paid a visit to that country and reconnected with his former childhood friend, who had settled there. By 1983, they were married. In a wedding photograph that sits behind the sofa in their living room, the dark-haired, dark-eyed newlyweds gaze beatifically from the heart of a red rose. “A little kitsch,” Ms. Katz says with an unapologetic smile. For many years after moving to the United States, the couple and their son, Nathan, now a 23-year-old teacher’s assistant, lived in a small semiattached house in Kensington, Brooklyn, near Mr. Katz’s parents. But they knew something of the world that lay beyond their front door. Avid cyclists, they regularly climbed aboard their Treks, pulled on their helmets (hers was silver, his white), and pedaled off to the shoreline bike path that runs under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and along Gravesend Bay. From that vantage point, they looked longingly at the houses in Bath Beach, a community that hugs the borough’s southwestern tip. “I used to say, it’s my dream to live close to the water,” Ms. Katz says, “and in a free-standing house.” By 2003, with both of Mr. Katz’s parents dead, little remained to tether the younger generation to the old neighborhood. One chilly spring morning in 2007, when they were in Bath Beach checking out a house on Cropsey Avenue, Ms. Katz’s eye was caught by a ’60s-era split-level across the street. In its little rear garden, bushes were starting to explode with bright orange buds. “That’s the one I want,” she announced. Her husband, who was especially taken with the brick accents on the façade, a reminder of the building material so familiar from his childhood, felt the same way.“Even outside,” he recalls,“I said to myself,‘We’re home.’” At that point, they hadn’t set foot past the front door. The Katzes had arrived in Bath Beach at an opportune moment. For generations, the area had been home to Jews and Italians; neighboring T H E H O U S E O f O p E N A R M S 3 9 Bensonhurst had been the setting for the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever , one of the iconic portraits of outer-borough New York and, less happily , the place where a black teenager named Yusuf Hawkins was fatally beaten by a gang of white youths in 1989 when he came to the area to look at a used car. In recent years, families from China, Russia, Mexico, and the Middle East have been streaming into the neighborhood. As old-timers began moving away, their one- and two-family houses, among them the dwelling that so charmed the Katzes, were coming onto the market. The four-bedroom house, which they bought for about $800,000, sits sandwiched snugly between two other homes. High-rises tower across the street. The house might not suit everyone, nor would the blindingly bright décor be to everyone’s taste. Yet it would be difficult to find a couple more enamored of the place where they live. And for two people whose parents had escaped death in the concentration camps, who themselves grew up amid the privations of postwar Russia, and who started out, as Mr. Katz sums it up, “with nothing,” it’s understandable that a place that offered both emotional roots and physical comfort would be meaningful. A main attraction was the downstairs apartment that’s now home to the couple’s son...