Published: NY Times, December 13, 2004
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
From the New York Times

As a girl growing up in Ukraine, Galit Galak wove macrame 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.
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.