I was different, obviously, and every Christmas I was forcibly reminded of that because I was trotted out before a holiday assembly of parents and teachers to sing one or two Chanukah songs before returning to my seat in the chorus. I, the token Jew, always lit a token menorah and recited a token blessing in a language that neither I, or anyone else in the audience, understood.

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 was to achieve, to be better, to value learning. This wasn't arrogance so much as 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. My father never spoke about his own past and was resistant to my clumsy adolescent attempts to get at some version of a truth.

It was not until my own children began asking questions for which I had no answers that I realized I had to go back to school to find out what there was to this thing called Judaism. This was no easy task, nor one I approached without a fair degree of ambivalence and skepticism.

Most Jews I knew ceased their formal Jewish education at age 13, forever limited with an adolescent's knowledge. For most, Jewishness was detachable, something into which one could shrug, like a tight coat. And I was saddled with not enough knowledge and just enough accumulated arrogance to believe that because I had excelled in my profession and my secular studies, I could easily master an arcane, antiquated religion simply by virtue of osmosis.

Keeping with my general themes of things hidden and things different, I chose the Internet as my forum. There I could click in, click out; I could 'lurk;' I could venture nothing, absorb what I chose, expel the rest.

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. To know our Jewishness we must reach reaching beyond the Holocaust to thousands of years of history, tradition and culture that came before, which 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 and 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 because balancing them can be tricky. Being Jewish isn't a barrier to be breached; it's part of me and central to my identity, as inextricable and indivisible as my eye color, my height, my general appearance, and the way I want others to view me.

In particular, I want this difference to be manifest in the way in which I treat myself and other people, and I want this difference to be a source of pride for me and my children.

I sometimes wish I was 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.

Ilsa J. Bick, M.D. is a psychiatrist in Fairfax, VA, and author of numerous articles on applied psychoanalysis and film.