At breakfast in Queens, New York, before my first day of school in America, my parents spoke in hushed, urgent voices, as if planning a heist.

I was eight years old, and we had just emigrated from the Soviet Union as refugees fleeing religious persecution. In the USSR, “Jew” appeared on internal documents as an ethnicity or nationality, not a religion. But it wasn’t until after arriving in America that I learned that my father was Jewish and my mother was not. And that meant, under traditional Jewish law, or halakha, which traces Jewish identity through the mother, I was not Jewish. 

So in our Rego Park kitchen at 7 a.m., nervously crunching Corn Flakes and sipping Tropicana orange juice with extra pulp, I watched my parents make a call, whisper, scheme and hang up. 

“It’s good,” my dad finally said, giving me a thumbs up. 

Soon after we arrived in America, my father enrolled me in a yeshiva, a Jewish school, afraid I would otherwise become a corrupted American girl. “Girls in America smoke and have sex at 11,” his Jewish American cousins had warned. 

My father had been born in predominantly Muslim Soviet Turkmenistan but raised in a Jewish home. Here in America, he wanted his daughter to stay connected to the Jewish identity his parents and generations before them had preserved. His parents, my grandparents Baruch and Rachel, were observant Jews who kept kosher and observed the holidays, and after my parents married, my mother learned customs, recipes and traditions from them. To my father, sending me to a Jewish school was a way to make sure that identity survived immigration, too. 

So now I was on my way to my first day at the yeshiva in America that my father, with the help of his cousin who had vouched for my Judaism, had schemed to get me into. I mourned the house, school, friends, grandmother and country I had just left behind in the USSR, while struggling to assimilate into a new place and learn a new language. Now I was also on a clandestine mission that involved lying. 

“What do I say if they ask me?” I whispered to my mother, not even sure who they were or what they might ask. 

“You’re Jewish,” she replied plainly.

From that........

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