Seagirt, Queens is a Jewish colony of the Russian Federation. Or so it seemed the day I drifted through it. A five-hour layover at JFK would provide the wholly unsought occasion to discover snatches of that country in my own. I was headed to Russia, that cold March afternoon, and for the first time. 'I want to see the water,' I remember thinking. 'Why not the end of the A Train?' I was in a globe-spinning mood. Seagirt is not the neighborhood’s actual name. The term is the name of a boulevard. Technically, it’s in Far Rockaway. But ‘Seagirt’ grew indelible in my memory, and easier to recall than the endless numbered Beach Streets that segment the peninsula. Seagirt means surrounded by the ocean, a description that also fits Russia, from where so many of the area’s residents had come. Thousands, especially Jews, had settled here as the USSR crumbled toward a new century. Russia is surrounded by seas of its own: the Baltic, Barents, Bering, Pacific. Each migrant traversed those waters—a latter-day Red Sea passage—to make it here. The A Train soared from solid ground, dancing along sun-flooded sea, the track connecting islands. I didn’t know you could do that in New York—ride a train at water-level, weightless, the windows lit to blinding. We straddled spits of land and frames of mind, surging to the coast. Ending at Mott Avenue, I passed crowded Caribbean storefronts, following the smell of brackish water. A sign in Cyrillic read: “Apteka-Polyklinika: Our doctors speak Russian!” I crossed the boulevard and past a shul with Hebrew letters tracing its roofline. The building looked to the water as if to the past. Heavy-coated women chatted in Russian below Soviet-looking apartment blocks. Perhaps they had done the same—cold-weather greetings, encounters between bus stops and elevators—in St. Petersburg or Novosibirsk. I nearly said 'Strazvuyte,' to air my good manners and what Russian I knew. Then I checked myself. Sociability in New York, as in Russia, does not permit hailing strangers on the street. The neighborhood flowed down the boardwalk. Boys in yarmulkes huddled on a bench, sharing a cigarette. It did not seem kosher. The wind ruled out swimming but a few hardy men carried fishing poles, daunted neither by the weather nor what they might catch in Queens’ polluted watershed. Russian fishing was much the same, I’d heard. Seeing Russian signs and hearing Russian spoken effected a kind of sensory red herring. What appeared Russian or Soviet was neither, at least not here. These Russophones had left by choice and for good reason. Not least of these was the endemic persecution against Jews, who arrived and sometimes thrived in this new Jerusalem outside Manhattan. In Moscow, the Jewish Museum braced me like a revelation. More Jews died from World War II violence in Soviet territory than anywhere else, it claimed. The museum bore the testimonies of Jewish combatants: Soviets, communists, patriots of the Motherland all. Simply surviving was victory. Had any gone to America? Had they sworn “Never again”? Or was it “Never say never again,” like Fievel Mousekewitz said, the Yiddish mouse from the 1980s cartoon? Fievel was making his own way to America, to his dreams. In movies and in life, conflict and ambition can drive refugees half a world away from home. Seagirt was abundant proof of that. Flying back I met a Hasidic family, one of dozens on their Moscow connection between Israel and New York. I’d spent a week amid art galleries, snow, and big-city loneliness. The Hasidic man, and his wife and their many children, needed to borrow my phone. Theirs could not withstand TSA’s network-scrambling within JFK. I pointed him to the spot outside where I’d gotten mine to work. He came back a moment later, viscerally relieved. Connection made. “I thank you!” he seemed to pray, grinning through his silver beard. “May God bless you today.” Smiles broke over his face like waves under a sunrise. I thought of Seagirt, just a train ride away, welcoming waves of humanity to its American shores. The Hasidic family, and their people, had come a long way to get here. In a far smaller way, so had I.