“Shloymie, come back here!”

“Mendie, stop hitting Shloymie!”

“Gitl, if you don’t stop teasing Freydl right this minute, we are never coming back to this zoo ever again!”

Occasionally, a few of the mothers would even yell at their children in Yiddish. Leora had studied a year’s worth of Yiddish during her first year of college under the guise of fulfilling a foreign-language requirement; she sensed there was something larger at work in her choice, something dating back to her family’s vacation in Europe, or perhaps to Bill Landsmann’s living room, although she had avoided thinking very much about what that something might be. The Yiddish she had studied was European Yiddish, academic Yiddish, the Yiddish that Jewish writers once used to free themselves from the religiousness of Hebrew, to prove that they were modern men. But the Yiddish of these mothers was the language of ultraorthodox American Jews, a hybrid of dialects that they used to avoid speaking Gentile English while saving holy Hebrew for only sacred things. Leora couldn’t understand them. But she assumed that they were saying something like “Yankl, if you try to climb into that seal tank one more time, you’ll be lucky if you make it home with both legs.”

Yet Jason stared and stared, as if it were not the flying sea lions but the Hassidim on display. Leora began squeezing his hand to get his attention, but even then he only turned around about once out of every three or four times. Only after Mugsy and Mango had performed their final twists through the air, to the joy of the people in the crowd—who, Leora wondered, might perhaps have seen themselves, somehow, in those fish out of water—did Jason pull Leora off to the side as the families dispersed to the other exhibits with a breathless “Did you see that?”

“See what?” Leora asked, pretending nonchalance.

“Come on,” Jason snorted. “You’re telling me you didn’t notice that today the East Mountain Zoo suddenly moved to Brooklyn?”

Leora sighed. In the course of their time together, Leora had become something of Jason’s tutor in reply to his occasional Jewish questions, a post she didn’t particularly enjoy. But she did have an answer. Today, she told him, was one of the middle days of Passover, a time when Jewish schools were closed for vacation. So perhaps these parents felt it was a nice day to take their children to the zoo.

“Oh, okay,” Jason said, stepping back. “Well, I’m glad it’s not a permanent massive Jewish invasion of the zoo.”

Leora stiffened and dropped his hand. “What are you, some kind of anti-Semite?”

Jason rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m a self-hating Jew. Or maybe a Jew-hating self, more accurately, since I don’t hate myself particularly, just other Jews.”

Leora watched him as he turned away from her. “I just mean you seem really uncomfortable around religious Jews, that’s all,” she offered lamely.

Jason leaned against the seal tank and blew on its surface. A wall of greenish water filled with bubbles and sardine bits pressed against the glass. Little waves of water rushed away from him, cowering before his breath. For a moment it seemed to Leora that if Jason blew hard enough, he could blow half of the tank’s water away, clearing an empty space for himself to step inside, high and dry. But then Sammy poked his head up through the opaque green waves, interrupting Jason’s ripples with his own concentric circles on the water’s surface and reminding her that the tank was much deeper than it appeared to be.