Daughter, lesbian, Jew.

"One lie is worth a thousand truths," my Italian aunt recently told me. She wasn't kidding. Lies are the stuff of great love and also of great disorientation, and families manage to generate both with remarkable dexterity.

My sister and I were raised Catholic in suburban America in the '60s, unaware that we were being protected from our own identity. Our parents almost never spoke of their lives in Eastern Europe before they immigrated to the States in

1950. My sister and I clung to bits of information they dropped from time to time: My father had spent years in Soviet labor camps; my mother had escaped Poland dressed as an Italian soldier. After a remarkable string of events brought them back together, they were married by a priest in Rome ten years to the day after they had first met.

It would take me over 30 years to understand what was missing from their romantic stow. My parents and aunt refused to fill in the details; implicit in their silence was a sense of both danger and unspeakable tragedy. A few years ago, while working as a lawyer in Boston, I was drawn to researching the mystery of my family's past. After a fair amount of detective work, my sister and I discovered the central missing piece: My parents and aunt were not Catholic witnesses to World War II but rather Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Nearly all our relatives had been gassed or shot by the Nazis.

The revelation that my parents and aunt had been living in hiding, concealing their true identity for over 40 years, hit me like a locomotive. The puzzles of my childhood suddenly leaped into focus and took on new meaning. I began to understand who my parents were, and I struggled to come to terms with who I was.

I recorded this process in a book called After Long Silence. I also decided (having hidden my own identity from them for over a decade) to come out to my parents as a lesbian.

I had hoped that speaking truthfully would bring my family closer together and relieve the pressure of living under false pretenses. I should have known better. My parents' need to remain in hiding was as strong as my need to come out and tell the truth about my identity as a Jew and a lesbian. Today, they seem to concede that I am a lesbian, but they still reject our Jewish identity.

My own path out of the closet has not been entirely smooth. When I first discovered the truth about my Jewish heritage, I found that Orthodox and Conservative Jews did not exactly embrace me as a lesbian. "Let's just put that aside," a Conservative rabbi said when I told him I was gay. "Once you reclaim your Jewish identity, you'll fall in love with a Jewish man." Judaism, he believed, would cure me of my homosexuality. At the same time, some of my gay and lesbian friends had little patience for my reluctance to come out as lesbian to my survivor parents. I was not allowed to join an organization called JLDHS--Jewish Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust Survivors, a member of the World Congress of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Jewish Organizations--until 1992, when I finally learned of my Jewish identity. Only then did I find people who understood the complications of coining out to parents whose lives had been devastated by the Holocaust.

Perhaps because of my genetic capacity for denial, for the first half of my life I was remarkably adept at hiding my lesbian identity from myself. But I gradually went from dating men to dating straight women--until finally I found myself falling for another self-admitted lesbian. Two years ago my partner and I exchanged marriage vows, and today we are the proud parents of a dog and cat, who exhibit no signs of shame at living with lesbians.

I'm grateful for the examples of others who have demonstrated that self-acceptance is the first step to living one's life fully. I'm fortunate to work with highly evolved individuals who accept and support me as a lesbian and a Jew--and, more recently, as a formerly closeted writer. I now work part-time as a lawyer to support my writing habit. At the age of 41, I am finally starting to feel that I'm able to give expression to all aspects of myself--however imperfectly. It's sweet.

Fremont is the author of After Long Silence (Delacorte).