“Elana’s been teaching Katie about Judaism,” they chuckled to my parents one morning. “Katie says she wants to convert”

Katie Malito was an unlikely friend for an 11-year-old from a sheltered Orthodox family. But friends were at a premium during the short stretches of summer we visited Bubby and Zeide in the Berkshires, and Katie, a perky, Catholic ten-year-old, was my default option.

During its glory years, North Adams, Massachusetts, hosted a small Jewish enclave huddled within the vast, wooded expanse of the Berkshire Mountains. It boasted a community large enough to support a shul, a rabbi, an after-hours Hebrew school, and its own chapter of a national Jewish youth organization.

But without a Jewish day school or yeshivah to anchor their commitment, by the 1980s, most of the community had shorn their Jewish praxis like a snakeskin. Bubby and Zeide’s home was the only kosher address for miles.

But that didn’t deter my family from heading up to North Adams for our annual visits. I’d bask in the delights of the small town, whose backyard forest, streams, and waterfall rendered our quiet New York suburb comparatively crass and citified. And that’s where I met Katie, one of a handful of local kids eager for a friend from the “big city.”

Together we explored the sloping forest just beyond the backyard, chased fireflies winking coyly at dusk, and walked across the street to splash in the swirling brook that emerged, like a mirage, from behind the last house on the block. Katie taught me how to salt slugs and play Spud, and together we planned an afternoon talent show, then traipsed around the block selling tickets to indulgent neighbors.

I knew that Katie, along with most of the neighborhood, wasn’t Jewish, but that didn’t put a damper on our friendship or on my considerable Jewish pride. To the contrary, I was eager to explain, discuss, and enlighten anyone who asked. Katie learned about kashrus symbols (initially mistaking the concept of an OU as license to consume anything with the letters O and U scattered somewhere on its packaging), and I learned that unlike at the kosher supermarkets back home, there was an abundance of products out there that didn’t carry kosher certification.

On one occasion, when I joined Katie’s family for a short outing, they stopped at the drive-through of a local non-kosher eatery. Eager to treat me, they passed me package after package of cakes to inspect, hopeful I’d find the coveted kosher symbol. I don’t know who was more surprised — me, when I didn’t find a kashrus symbol on any of the many packages they offered, or the Malitos, who’d never encountered a child who refused a treat, even when unencumbered by watchful parents.

That outing left its mark. Decades later, when I bumped into Mr. Malito, he expressed wonder at the self-restraint exhibited by my ten-year-old self.