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He wonders if I am familiar with the word landsman—and I am. It’s the word my mother used, interchangeably, with our family phrase “one of us.” Literally, a landsman is a person who comes from the same place, back in the old country. A landsman is someone with whom you find a connection of the heart and soul.

Jerry tells me we are landsmen, he and I.

I write back, as always, the day his letter arrives. “Oh, yes, I know the word landsman well, the people to whom it refers very little—well, landsmen are, to me, a rare and valuable group of just a few. Finding one makes me happier than I can say.”

The quality of feeling between landsmen is not about sexual passion or even, in conventional terms, love. It’s more basic than that even. You know this person. You register what happens in similar ways. You understand each other.

… What I see in Jerry Salinger—and this is far more significant for me than his literary celebrity—is the possibility that there might be another human being on the planet in whose presence I won’t need to conceal my true identity. What’s the desire of a boy to kiss me or have sex with me, compared to the extraordinary sense of relief and comfort of finding a fellow human being who recognizes and embraces me like a long-lost countryman?

… “I haven’t had a friendship like this before, you know, kiddo,” he tells me one night. “Don’t quite know what to make of it, and I don’t much want to worry the thing to death. God knows what’s to be done about it. I’m just happy knowing you exist on a planet of aliens. Or maybe you and I are the aliens. Either way it would be a lonely world for me without you.”