The car turned onto Algonquin Drive. Their town was divided into sections where all the street names matched a certain theme, and Algonquin Drive was in the “Indian Section,” or, as Leora’s somewhat pretentious teacher at the high school liked to call it, the “indigenous people’s section.” Bill Landsmann was indigenous to Algonquin Drive. Leora’s father slowed the car to a crawl, searching among the dimly lit house numbers for 413. When they found it, a tiny house with thick curtains drawn over the windows, and walked up to ring the doorbell, Bill Landsmann had already opened the door for them. Leora did recognize him, once she saw him again. In his narrow lips and his thinness, he resembled Naomi. His left hand was pressed against the doorpost, while his right hand, a road map of red and blue arteries and veins glowing through the pale skin, dangled from a perilously thin wrist that looked as though it might tear like paper if he were to offer his hand to them to shake it. He didn’t.

“Welcome, welcome!” he announced in the stilted, accented voice Leora remembered from his phone call. “Wonderful to have you. Come in, come in, and I will show you my slides.”

When the three of them had entered, Leora noticed that Bill Landsmann’s entire house had the New Car Smell. In fact, the vast majority of objects in his house appeared to have been made out of pine paneling and vinyl. They passed through the hallway, devoid of any decoration, and went into the living room. Leora walked behind Bill Landsmann, her parents following behind her, keeping her eye on the back of his white-haired head as if it were a sort of beacon, a torch leading them to their destination. But it was Bill Landsmann’s voice that signaled them to stop: “Please, have a seat.”

Leora and her parents sat down on a hard burgundy vinyl couch. Aside from the couch, the room was furnished with three chairs, a coffee table, a rug, and an ancient, wood-encased television set, bestudded with giant dials. Leora was relieved to note, after a quick glance around the room, that no portraits of family members were displayed anywhere. But the strangest part of the room, the part that made it seem as if the three of them had landed in something that wasn’t quite a living room at all, was the wall of bookshelves. The shelves, covering an entire long wall of the room, were filled with row upon row of black cardboard boxes, each exactly the same size, distinguishable from one another only by the bright yellow numbers painted, with a perfection that must have required a stencil, on their sides. The numbers went well into the hundreds. Along the right side of the shelves was a small hook, and a black vinyl notebook was hanging from it, suspended by a thick red cord. The bottom shelf was devoted to a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.