Who is Mr. and Mrs. Solovey from A Walker in the City and what is their importance?

Mr. and Mrs. Solovey are a Russian Jewish couple who, somewhat incongruously, moved to Brownsville after living in what the author believed were some of the most beautiful, exotic places on earth (Paris, Moscow, etc). For him, Mrs. Solovey's ethereal blond beauty and Mr. Solovey's slovenliness and lack of business sense, both apparently deliberately sustained, were both fascinating and troubling. They were, for the author, outsiders within a community of outsiders, their sense of being lost in both the larger and the more immediate worlds increasing his own desperation to find a place where he could feel as though HE belonged.