Rockaway. Tara Ison

for answers?”

      “Looking for questions.” He smiles, nods at a young couple pushing a stroller. “Shabbat Shalom,” he tells them, and they smile, murmur back: “Chag Sameach.”

      “See, that’s nice,” he says quietly to Sarah. “All the young people living here now. They’re moving back and settling down, starting their own families. We got all these kids growing up here together, the Jewish kids, the Irish and the Hispanic and black kids, they’re all out on the playground. The old people, they sit and watch. Everyone going to shul or church on Sunday morning. A real community. It’s beautiful. It’s got this energy, you know? When people come together like that.”

      “It’s so different from where I grew up. Nobody talked to anybody. Everybody just drives around in their car.”

      “So, this is good for you, yeah?”

      “Oh sure,” she says. “You can really feel the energy here. Like you said.

      He nods. She doesn’t know what else to say. They walk in silence, as she feels the fog limpen her hair.

      ITZAK LOOKS LIKE an Old World photograph of someone’s dead great-grandfather, in blacks and beiges, elaborately yarmulke’d, with sepia-tinted teeth and long gray beard wispy as a cirrus cloud. The house is decorated with Judaica. Sarah expects his wife to be shrouded and bewigged and haggard from childbearing, but Darlene is trimly dressed in a sleeveless blouse and slacks, with her own curly bobbed hair. Their teenage son Jonah is wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, and joke-pleads with his father about the promise of a new videogame; their daughter Gwen, skinny and miniskirted, her right ear triple-pierced, is a freshman at NYU, studying psychology. They invite Sarah to sit in the place of honor and she readies herself, steels herself for the endless and obligatory ritual—Why matzoh? Why bitter herbs? Why do we recline?—but there is no wine-stained Haggadah in sight, no painstaking array of bitter herbs and chopped apple-and-nuts; the family simply sings in Hebrew one quick and ebullient prayer she doesn’t know, and Itzak announces That’s it, everybody, let’s eat!

      Everyone troops happily to the kitchen sink to wash their hands. Back at the table Itzak passes her a plate of matzoh and she readies herself again, for the hurrying-from-bondage-and-Pharaoh’s-troops lecture (lamb’s blood smeared on doors, gross), the ten plagues that always creeped her out as a child (pestilence, boils, locusts, darkness and tragedy and despair to be visited upon their house at any moment), but Itzak’s discussion of matzoh is Freudian: The unleavened bread, he says, symbolizes the suppression of human ego. Risen bread, puffed up with yeast and air, shows the swelling of ego, the human soul presumptuous before God. Gwen proclaims all religious ecstasy—any type of religious faith, she argues, actually—to be merely a form of psychological repression if not outright delusion, which Jonah—apparently planning on rabbinical school—takes good-natured issue with, and as the debate continues and floats over her head and beyond her, Sarah quickly drinks down the glass of kosher wine Itzak has poured for her—an exception to the rule, but she’s never tasted kosher wine, is curious, although there is no discernible difference in taste from regular wine, she thinks—then is too embarrassed to ask for more. Always plenty of wine, at home, at least. The Kiddush, the blessing of the wine, fill that cup again, by all means.