But Mr. Rosenthal wasn’t interested in gentle and kind. “Listen to me, Marcus,” he said in almost a fierce whisper. By now he was clutching Jason’s arm in a vise grip. (Funny, Leora thought to herself as she listened to the story, how both babies and old people have such unbelievably tight grips with their hands. On the edges of life, everyone is afraid to let go.) “Deep-sea divers, they go and get things back from the bottom of the ocean, don’t they?”

Hearing Mr. Rosenthal’s question, Jason stared at him, bewildered, and nodded, though his knowledge of marine exploration was based mainly on a television special he had once watched about Jacques Cousteau.

“Then forget all this soccer garbage,” Mr. Rosenthal whispered furiously, “because that is what I want you to be. A deep-sea diver.”

Their conversation paused there. Jason had felt awkward, he told Leora, as he didn’t usually feel with the old people. Most of the time, he would walk into one of their rooms and just talk with them, for hours. Many of them were so starved for conversation that they could talk about almost anything, for what seemed like days on end. Others didn’t like to talk, and preferred to listen to Jason talk, or just to sit with him in silence. Yet it was rare that someone like Mr. Rosenthal, who liked to talk, would suddenly stop. To prod him to continue, Jason asked him, why deep-sea diving? He suspected that the whole deep-sea diving business would turn out to be some sort of delusion, the kind of thing that had been happening more and more often with Mr. Rosenthal. But to Jason’s surprise, Mr. Rosenthal actually answered him.

Mr. Rosenthal told “Marcus” that he had come to America when he was just Marcus’s age—which of course meant nothing to Jason, since he had no idea how old the real Marcus was, let alone how old Mr. Rosenthal thought the real Marcus was, but Jason was twenty-one, so he began to think of Marcus, and of Mr. Rosenthal when he came to America, as a pair of twenty-one-year-olds, not unlike himself. Then Mr. Rosenthal began babbling on and on about the journey to America, about how you had to cross two borders with forged papers just to get to Bremen, which was a town in Germany where your ship to England was docked, and then the ship took you to Liverpool, where you boarded another ship, this time to America, and then about how horrible it was in steerage class at the bottom of the ship, how you and all the other Jews were packed in by the hundreds, piled on top of each other like packages, and the ship kept rolling and everyone kept vomiting and there was no ventilation and the whole place smelled like shit and vomit for two weeks and you couldn’t even walk three steps without tripping over some screaming little child.

After two weeks in this pit, Mr. Rosenthal finally reached the Promised Land, and he and all the other Jews on the ship crawled out of their steerage hellhole to go up on the deck and see New York Harbor, the place of their dreams. They crowded over to the side of the deck as the ship pulled in right under the Statue of Liberty, and Mr. Rosenthal was as awestruck as everyone else. But then Mr. Rosenthal noticed that the other Jews on the deck weren’t just looking at the Statue of Liberty. Instead they were actually pushing up to the edge of the deck, as if they were looking at something in the water. Mr. Rosenthal pushed in a little closer, and then he saw why they were all gathered on the side. They were throwing their tefillin overboard. Because tefillin were something for the Old World, and here in the New World they didn’t need them anymore.