But I wasn’t “just” a Jew. I was a child of a Holocaust survivor, and my identity hinged upon a single historical event. The tension between hiding difference and extolling that difference formed our family’s ethos. The emphasis in our family was to achieve, to be better than those around us, to value learning. This wasn’t arrogance so much as a more sophisticated version of a survivalist mentality.

For most of the year, however, we were “just like” anyone else. We blended. We rarely went to synagogue. We didn’t keep Kosher. My mother knew no Hebrew. But I was Jewish because I stood alongside a culture; Jewishness leaked into the semi-permeable membrane cocooning my consciousness by osmosis, by virtue of who I was, or more to the point, what my father had been. It never occurred to me that anything more like effort or systematized learning might be involved, or even desirable. To me, Jewishness was synonymous with the Holocaust, my very existence a victory over Nazism, my life a curious rebuttal of the most inexplicable sort of death. It would be easy to imagine that the responsibility for this conundrum lay at my father’s door; he was, after all, the survivor. But he didn’t regale me with tales of Nazi atrocities. What I had instead was silence. Absence. I had no grandparents or real family on his side, no stories within which my place in an historical chain could be linked, for my father never spoke about his own past and was later resistant to my clumsy adolescent attempts to get at some version of a truth.

To me, Jewishness was synonymous with the Holocaust, my very existence a victory over Nazism, my life a curious rebuttal of the most inexplicable sort of death

I was wrong.

My Jewish transformation hasn’t been revelatory. I haven’t been hit by a blinding light, dissolved into hysterical tears, or undergone some great catharsis. I argue regularly with my rabbi. I’ve rediscovered my difference in a new way. What’s more important is that I’ve discovered what I don’t know, and more to the point, I refuse now to be defined as the product only of a traumatic event. A person can’t know where she’s going until she understands where she’s been, and a Jew can’t know her Jewishness without reaching beyond the nexus of the Holocaust to the thousands of years of history, tradition, and culture which came before and which, taken in sum, are distilled into the laws of Kashrut, the injunctions to one’s fellow man, the forms of observance and study, and the concrete manifestations of that menorah, that language, those songs. I have learned that my Jewishness does not begin in 1939, nor did it come to an end in 1945. History, not a Holocaust, shapes my identity.

I have learned that being Jewish takes effort, as much as any secular study, and maybe more

Sometimes I wish I were eight again, not because I want to go back into hiding or let my Jewishness leak in and out in dribs and drabs, but because I think now that my songs would sound that much sweeter, my voice be that much stronger, and those tiny candles burn ever brighter.