My interviewee and I were sitting on a stage, about to get microphoned for a live interview I was conducting as part of an event at work. We had run out of prep material, so the conversation turned to where I’m from—I told him Midland, Texas—and eventually, to my heritage.

“I’m Russian,” I responded. “The last name is Hebrew.”

I learned this in a grade school genealogy project, when we had to look up the origin of our last name and then draw it. Mine was Hebrew, and as if that wasn’t weird enough, the genealogy book said it meant “cantor.” I didn’t know what that was and had to look it up separately, only to learn that it was some sort of singer in a synagogue. I didn’t know what a synagogue was either. I was jealous of the girl whose last name was Welsh for “stone.”

Back onstage, my interviewee pressed me further.

“So you’re Jewish?” he asked.

“My dad is,” I answered truthfully, hoping we would run out of bullshitting time soon.

“So,” he said, smiling slightly. I can only imagine what he was thinking: There are so few ways to make a genuine connection in this cruel world! Let’s try to make one now. “Did you have enough Jews in Midland for a minyan?”

For a solid three seconds I thought he was asking me if my West Texas hometown was populated by yellow animated creatures, the Minions.

“I’m sorry,” I said weakly. “I don’t know what that is.”

“What?” he said. “Minyan? Minyan!” (Surely she’ll get it, daughter of a Jew after all!)

“I…I don’t.”

“Minyan! Minyan!”

“MOST RUSSIAN JEWS ARE ATHEISTS!” I cried, a millisecond before our mics went live.

I turned to the audience and smiled. “Thank you all for joining us!”

The journey of my weirdness, I suppose, begins with my family and others like it being cast aside as weirdos in our own homeland.

Jews like my father were considered a separate race in the Soviet Union, determined by blood and denoted in a person’s passport. Jews ranked prominently among the many peoples ethnic Russians historically disliked.

Under the czars, my ancestors were forced to live in far-flung villages beyond the “Pale of Settlement.” My great-great-grandfather was only allowed to move to Saint Petersburg because he had grown wealthy off the lumber business—then as now, money talked in Russia. Employers avoided hiring Jews, and the best universities were generally out of reach to them, as well. My father’s alma mater—a strong technical university in Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg was then known—was a “Jewish school.” Its director was a gentile, but because he was a war hero, he was impervious to the political pressure aimed at keeping out Jews and other minorities. Word spread that Jews would be accepted there, so an atheist yeshiva formed in the heart of Russia’s second-largest city.