That day was shining, an almost unnaturally gleaming spring day at the East Mountain Zoo, the kind of day when bare arms emerge for the first time from their winter hibernation in deep long sleeves. Leora and Jason were watching the seal show. Mugsy and Mango, sea lions extraordinaire, sailed through the air in perfect formation to the predictable delight of the crowd, and the appearance of Sammy, the “true seal” who, like all true seals—as opposed to the sea lions—was a fat round tube of a beast who could barely do anything more than swim and wriggle himself onto a rock, received the usual number of laughs as the zookeeper coaxed him out of the water to tease him, showing all the things that Sammy couldn’t do. Yet Sammy the Seal bore it like a humble martyr, ignoring the crowd as he waddled his way onto the demonstration rock and sometimes not even accepting the sardines thrown his way as reparations. Sammy knew who he was, Leora thought, and she followed him with her eyes through the glass sides of the tank as he dove into the water, soaring, with a grace the sea lions would never have, beneath its depths.

About halfway through the seal show, Leora noticed that Jason wasn’t paying any attention to Mugsy and Mango, or even to Sammy under the waterline. Nor was he looking at his feet or off into space, as he might have been if he were just distracted. No, Jason was clearly looking, staring even, at the crowd around him, with the same fascination they were directing toward Mugsy and Mango. Leora glanced around and realized what he was looking at. With the exception of the two of them and about ten others, all of the people at the seal show that afternoon were Hassidim.

They all looked different from each other, of course, and the crowd didn’t seem like the seas of black hats that sometimes appear in movies or news broadcasts about certain neighborhoods in Jerusalem or Brooklyn. But that was because of the women and the kids, who broke up the black-hat ocean into a saturation of lakes, each surrounded by its lakefront property of wives and children. The women all either had their hair hidden under kerchiefs or hats or had thick, shiny straight hair, often with elaborate bangs—wigs, Leora realized. They wore long-sleeved shirts despite the brilliant sun, and long skirts that stopped short over sneakers or sandals. But what fascinated Leora were the children. Judging by the number of children running and screaming and banging on the glass in front of Sammy’s tired face, she estimated that the child-to-couple ratio was somewhere around five to one. Each of the women—weary, worn-out, wrung-out women, although many of them couldn’t have been much older than Leora herself—clutched the handles of at least one stroller, more often a twin-style two-seater, and sometimes even a giant wagon with seats for four or five. The mothers were yelling at their children, as mothers at the East Mountain Zoo always did. But the names they were yelling were different.