These days, the lingua franca on the Boardwalk in Brighton Beach is Russian. For every ice cream parlor there are two Gastronoms named after another city in the former Soviet Union. On any given morning, rain or shine, winter or summer, you can see a group of Russian Jews doing calesthenics on the beach. For some, the boardwalk joining Brighton Beach to Sea Gate via Coney Island represents Odessa. For others, its Russian restaurants, nightclubs, fruit stands, and bookstores represent their ethnic haven in the New World, within earshot of the ubiquitous El (New York elevated railway).

These Russian Jews have closed the circle of the mass immigration to America, not only because the beaches and baths, Luna Park and Dreamland, Thousand-and-One-Nights and Tower of Seville were the first taste of paradise for millions of their coreligionists, but also because, with their backs to America and their faces to the ocean, the new immigrants have replicated a whole era in Jewish American culture. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Coney Island became the physical and psychological boundary between the Old World and the New, a liminal, conflictual space where one's longing – and loathing – for the Old World were experienced most keenly; where, awash in the sea of humanity, or as pilgrim to this mecca of mass amusement, the Jewish newcomer sometimes felt more alone than anywhere else. On the beach itself, a million footsteps and a thousand sand castles are washed away daily with the tide. So too the Jewish cultural experiment whose bold contours were highlighted so clearly against the backdrop of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. It has vanished, with nary a trace, so that each generation is left to repeat the cycle all over again: from exile, to deliverance, to exile.