“I can relate to that.” Dad had just polished off his second glass of wine. Nothing like alcohol to take the edge off. Koby refilled his glass, then his own.

“It’s pretty good, no?”

“Very good,” my father agreed. “You’re a red-wine drinker?”

“Primarily, yes.”

“So what was your first outing?” Sammy asked.

Koby laughed. “My friend Reuven and I were given over to two eighteen-year-old yeshiva boys from Itri or Hakotel, someplace in Jerusalem. It was supposed to be a morning of learning Chumash and an afternoon of fun and adventure. The morning was a bust. Their Hebrew was poorer than ours was. Perhaps it was the Long Island accent. We kept asking, ‘Mah atem omrim?’ ‘What are you saying?’ We couldn’t understand a word! Besides, someone had set up a hoop in our refugee camp and all we want to do was shoot baskets. Finally, after lunch, they take us to the bus stop for our first day in the city. Reuven and I have never been on a real bus before.”

“I can see where this is leading,” Rina said.

“Up and down the aisle, people were screaming at us. We didn’t care. Then the boys take us to Kanyonit.” He turned to me. “A minimall. Only it’s brand new and there are no shops inside. Just this one little store that sells goofiot—T-shirts. That’s it. All this empty space and nothing but T-shirts. The rest of the bottom floor of the mall was empty except for the escalators … which we had never seen before. To us, it was Disneyland. Up the down, and down the up, and over and over and over. Drove those poor boys crazy because, let me tell you, we were fast little bugs. I ran competitive track in Maccabee competition.”

“That’s really cool,” Jacob said.

“How’d you do?” Sammy asked.

“Good enough for my coach to say, think about the Olympics for Israel. But that would have meant devoting hours to running. I lacked the drive to work that hard. Without drive, forget it. Still, I could move, as the yeshiva boys found out.”

“Those poor white boys never had a chance,” Sammy remarked.

“Such is life.” Koby turned to Rina. “The lamb is delicious.”

“Then you’ll have more,” Rina said.

“Please.” Koby took another small piece, then started laughing. “Okay. So after the escalator rides, they get the bright idea to take us bowling. That is upstairs—a bowling alley and a snack bar. We’re running across the lanes. The manager screams at the boys in Hebrew, the boys scream at us in English, which, of course, we don’t understand. And the few Israelis there … they’re smoking away, shaking their heads in very much disapproval, saying ‘Ayzeh chayot’—‘those animals.’ The boys finally hold us by our shirts—literally. Then we start begging them to buy us something to eat.”

He turned to me.

“The snack bar has no teudat kashrut—a certificate that states a place as kosher—and these two religious boys do not want to buy us anything from an uncertified place. We beg and beg and beg. They cave in and buy us a Coke. We beg some more. They cave in and buy us potato chips in a bag with a kosher symbol. Then I see this boy blowing up the bag and punching it until it makes a pop.”