The Melting-Pot. (1914 edition). big apple: Arno Press, 1975. four DAVID G. ROSKIES Coney Island, united states: the USA within the Yiddish literary mind's eye nowadays, the lingua franca at the Boardwalk in Brighton seashore is Russian. for each ice cream parlor there are Gastronoms named after one other urban within the former Soviet Union. On any given morning, rain or shine, wintry weather or summer season, you'll discover a bunch of Russian Jews doing calesthenics at the seashore. For a few, the boardwalk becoming a member of Brighton seashore to Sea Gate through Coney Island represents Odessa. For others, its Russian eating places, nightclubs, fruit stands, and bookstores symbolize their ethnic haven within the New international, inside earshot of the ever present El (New York increased railway). those Russian Jews have closed the circle of the mass immigration to the USA, not just as the seashores and baths, Luna Park and Dreamland, Thousand-and-One-Nights and Tower of Seville have been the 1st style of paradise for thousands in their coreligionists, but additionally simply because, with their backs to the USA and their faces to the sea, the recent immigrants have replicated an entire period in Jewish American tradition. through the 1st decade of the 20 th century, Coney Island turned the actual and mental boundary among the outdated international and the hot, a liminal, conflictual house the place one’s longing – and loathing – for the outdated international have been skilled such a lot keenly; the place, awash within the sea of humanity, or as pilgrim to this mecca of mass enjoyment, the Jewish newcomer occasionally felt extra on my own than wherever else. at the seashore itself, one million footsteps and one thousand sand castles are washed away day-by-day with the tide. So too the Jewish cultural scan whose daring contours have been highlighted so essentially opposed to the backdrop of Brighton seashore and Coney Island. It has vanished, with nary a hint, in order that each one new release is left to copy the cycle yet again: from exile, to deliverance, to exile. From citadel backyard they have been thrust headlong no longer right into a melting pot, yet a keslgrub, a whirlpool as a lot linguistic as socioeconomic. by no means prior to had such a lot of Yiddish-speaking Jews been pressured to rub shoulders with different Jews from varied areas and talking diversified dialects. traditionally, the “Litvaks” got here first, these from Posen, Kurland, and Suwalki, who spoke a seriously Germanicized Yiddish, and people from (Jewish) Lithuania, whose pronunciation used to be closest to an imagined, privileged, common. however the “Rumener” weren't a ways in the back of, talking a variation of Ukrainian (Southeastern) Yiddish, to not converse of the much-maligned “Galitsyaner”, who shared a Southwestern dialect with the Polish Jews, and who as a result of their severe poverty, obtained saddled with a worse acceptance, and in contrast to the Rumanians, had no matinee idol named Aaron Lebedeff to sing their praises. in addition to breeding mutual contempt, dwelling in such shut quarters sharpened one’s ear for the actual assets of one’s language, in particular the Slavic part. Litvaks fused extra Russian into their speech; the others, extra Polish and Ukrainian.