Chapter 1

My mother’s voice still echoes in the rooms of my memory, sharp as a kitchen knife. You must never forget who you are and where you come from. She said it every Friday night as she lit the Shabbat candles, her hands circling the flames three times before covering her eyes. I would watch from the doorway, feeling the heat of the fire and the cold of my own distance. She prayed. I waited. She believed. I questioned. She saw a chain of generations stretching back to Abraham. I saw a story I wasn’t sure I wanted to inherit.

My father would find me later, after the prayers were done and the challah was blessed. He never pushed. He would sit beside me on the old couch that smelled of dust and gefilte fish, and he would say, Your heart knows its own path, my child. That was his way—quiet, patient, leaving space for me to breathe. But even his gentleness couldn’t fill the hollow space where faith was supposed to live.

I remember one evening when I was maybe twelve. It was Passover, and the whole house smelled of horseradish and burnt sugar. Relatives crowded around the table, and my grandfather led the Seder in a voice that creaked like the wooden floors. I knew the words by heart—Ma Nishtana, the Four Questions—but they felt like lines from a play I had memorized but never believed. When my turn came to recite, I stumbled. My mother’s eyes locked onto me, and I saw something flicker there: disappointment, maybe, or fear. Fear that I was slipping away from the fold.

After dinner, she pulled me into the kitchen. Her hands were wet from washing dishes, and she didn’t dry them before she gripped my shoulders. "You must never forget who you are," she said again, her voice trembling. "You are a Jew. That is not a choice. It is a fact."

"But what if I don't feel it?" I asked, and the words came out smaller than I intended.

She let go of me and turned back to the sink. "Feelings are not facts."

That was the closest we ever came to a real conversation about it. After that, I learned to keep my doubts to myself. I learned to smile during the holidays, to nod when the rabbi spoke, to pretend that the prayers meant something to me. But inside, I was building a wall between the person I showed them and the person I was becoming.

That person was an atheist. Not in a loud, confrontational way—more like a quiet, certain absence. I didn't hate God; I simply didn't believe He existed. And that disbelief felt like a betrayal of everything my mother had taught me. It felt like dirt on my heart, a stain I couldn't wash away.

My father once told me that our people have a long history of asking hard questions. "It's in our blood," he said. "Abraham argued with God. Job demanded answers. We are a people of wrestlers." I wanted to believe that my doubt was part of that tradition, but I knew my mother would never see it that way. To her, questioning was one thing; outright rejection was another.

So I carried my atheism like a secret lover, hidden in the deepest pocket of my coat. I only took it out when I was alone, in my room, staring at the ceiling and wondering what it meant to be part of a people I didn't fully belong to.

And there was something else, too—something darker. A weight that wasn't just my own. I could feel the ghosts of my ancestors in the air, their suffering pressing down on me. The pogroms, the gas chambers, the long walk of exile. My mother spoke of them often, as if their memory was a sacred duty. Never forget, she said, and I understood. But the remembering felt like swallowing stones. I didn't just inherit a history; I inherited a wound.

I know that the heart belongs to children, but not literature. That line came to me one night when I was trying to write. I had filled pages with angry scribbles, trying to articulate the knot in my chest. But the words wouldn't come. They were too heavy, too tangled. I realized then that my heart was not meant for stories—it was meant for feeling, for carrying the pain that my mother had passed down to me like a family heirloom.

But literature was the only way I knew to make sense of the mess. So I kept writing, even when it hurt. Even when the words felt like lies.

This is where I begin: with a contradiction. I am a Jewish atheist. I am a daughter who loves her mother but cannot believe what she believes. I am a woman carrying the weight of a history she did not choose, trying to find a way to put it down.

I am starting this book because I have to. Because the silence is too loud. Because if I don't write it out, it will stay inside me like a splinter, festering.

My mother once said that I was born with a stone in my heart. Maybe she was right. But stones can be carved. They can become letters, words, stories. And maybe that is the only kind of faith I have left—faith in the act of telling.

So here goes. I am going to write about the dirt and the light, the love and the anger, the God I don't believe in and the people I cannot escape. I am going to write until the pain has a shape, a voice, a name.

I am going to write until I understand what it means to be me.

And I am terrified of what I might find.