Steam rooms bring Russian immigrants together

One in an occasional series on America's changing face.

Grigory Konkin hurls a pail's worth of water into the huge, hellishly hot brick oven. Steam too hot to fog diffuses in the room as men and women in bathing suits file in.

Banya veterans scurry to the highest of its three benches, where the temperature can exceed 200 degrees.

Some wear felt hats to prevent scalps from scorching. Some carry veniki, soaked branches used to whip skin to a rosy hue, increasing the sensation of heat.

Konkin's friend Bryon MacWilliams  uses a scented wand shaped like a pool skimmer to sweep the hottest air near the ceiling onto glistening devotees. "Thank you," several gasp. "Spasibo."

Snapshots from Moscow, or a dacha in Russia's countryside?

No, closer to home: Southampton Spa in Southampton, Bucks County, a magnet for local immigrants with a passion for Russia's ritual pastime.

"With all the immigration we've got people from all the former Soviet Republics, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, all over," said Alex Lebedinsky, 66, who staffs the desk where towels and robes are distributed and signs are in English and the curly Cyrillic of written Russian.

"They come to socialize, eat traditional foods, and speak their own language," said Lebedinsky, who emigrated from Moldova 37 years ago and like many of these immigrants lives in Northeast Philadelphia.

The spa bills itself as greater Philadelphia's only authentic Russian bathhouse, complete with a restaurant serving smoked fish, an ice-cold plunge pool, and a patio where super-heated clients roll in the snow.

It opened seven years ago, is as big as a hangar, and costs $25 for all-day admission.

The arrival of cold weather means "the season is on" for prime steaming, Lebedinsky said, although true devotees enjoy banya even when it's blazing outdoors.

The U.S. Census, in its most recent data, estimates that 25,000 people in Philadelphia, Bucks, Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery Counties in Pennsylvania and Camden, Burlington, and Gloucester Counties in South Jersey speak Russian at home.

Alex Shraybman, president of New World Association, a two-decades-old immigrant-support center on Bustleton Avenue, thinks the number of Russian and former Soviet Republic immigrants in the region could be much higher than the Census estimate when you count at least 10,000 Ukrainians and others who arrived in and around Philadelphia after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

In Somerton, Bustleton, and Rhawnhurst and parts of Bucks County, "Ukrainian and Russian immigrants - stemming initially from refugee resettlement in that area in the 1990s - dominate the mix of foreign born," notes a 2008 Brookings Institution report on change in the region.

Svetlana Krakopolskaya, 46, an analyst at TD Bank who came to Philadelphia from St. Petersburg in 2002, said she visits the Southampton banya about once every six weeks.

She was there on the recent night when MacWilliams, 48, and Konkin, 54, who was visiting from Moscow, created a series of signature steams infused with garlic, mint, and aromatic oils. MacWilliams read excerpts from his book, With Light Steam: A Personal Journey Through the Russian Baths, published last month.

Konkin, a banya master, is expert at creating moist but not overly saturated steam. Known to his friends as "Grisha," he is a central figure in MacWilliams' book. He was greeted warmly among the 50 or so people who turned out for the group steam-cum-book launch.

The event included a traditional spread: blini, "herring in fur coats," black peppered pig fat chased with vodka, and kvass, a foamy drink made from fermented rye bread.

The Southampton banya, said Krakopolskaya, as she nibbled on the comfort food, reminds her of the steam baths she took as a child on her family's dacha.

Shraybman said he is not a big fan of big steam. But when he visited the spa with a nephew three years ago, it rekindled memories of childhood, when his father took him to banya once a week "for sanitary purposes" because they didn't have bathing facilities at home in Ukraine.

Irina Brown, an internist now living in Silver Spring, Md., was raised in Kazakhstan. She and her husband, Frank Brown, befriended MacWilliams, who grew up in Wenonah, Gloucester County, and spent 12 years in Moscow as a journalist for American and British media, when the three lived in Russia and discovered their shared passion for steam. The Browns, along with their son Savva, 11, attended the book party.

Irina said she has always been passionate about banya, and at one point she lay flat and alone on a bench to get the maximum heat.

For Frank, who was a Newsweek correspondent in Moscow, banya is an acquired taste. In the private banyas of Russia, men and women steam together, often naked. In the public banyas, men and women steam nude but separately.

"As an American," said Frank Brown, "all I could see was this homoerotic environment - the steam, the whipping. It took me a long time to get over it."

But eventually, he said, he became such a fan "that I started going to church on Wednesday, so I could go to banya on Sunday."

Now that's banya as religion.