I had just turned six and was about to start first grade. That morning of Mehri (September 21) our warm narrow kitchen on the third floor near Jordan Boulevard in northern Tehran was filled with excitement.

Sitting at the kitchen table with my father and older brother, my mother smiled with pride as she sent us off to school. “You're a big boy today. It's your first day in school. You'll learn to read, to write. You'll make many friends." She ran back and forth, smiling, laughing and preparing my lunch as I had watched her do for my brother for two years.

Dressed in my new school clothes, I wore the Star of David pendant that my grandmother brought back for me from Israel that summer.

Sitting across from me, calm, somewhat distant, with a sternness that at that moment so sharply set him apart from my mother, my father was drinking his morning tea. Dad leaned over and gently slipped the gold pendant under my shirt collar. "That's not for everyone to see. If anyone in school asks about your religion, tell them you're Muslim."

A strange quiet filled the kitchen as my first school day nervousness turned to confusion. My father was telling me to lie! “Stop filling the boy's head with nonsense,” my mother protested. “Nobody cares about that stuff anymore. Jewish, Muslim what does it matter nowadays? We're all Iranian and that's that. That's all that's important. Just say you're Iranian, as Iranian as them, that's all. Stop filling the child's head with nonsense."

My father turned back toward me and with the same seriousness and calm I would hear again five years later the night he came into my room to tell me we were leaving for America the next day, he said: "If anybody asks your religion, you can lie."

I was too young to understand the implications of what my father was telling me. My world in Iran was largely secular, so my Jewishness was never a matter of contention. My nanny was Muslim, as were all of our neighbors and virtually all my parents' friends and colleagues. Everyone knew we were Jewish and no one ever made an issue of it. To them, as to us, our Jewish heritage was a benign matter of identity and cultural difference.

In that secular world, being Jewish meant to me eating different foods once in a while, and hearing my father speak to his parents in a Judeo-Persian dialect, a language I understood but could not speak. It meant watching my uncle break a glass when he got married. It meant that I was not allowed to sit in my grandmother's lap and laugh for seven days after they called from Israel to say that her mother had died.

These things made me Jewish, I thought. And none of them seemed worth lying about. Nevertheless, later that day when my pendant slipped out from under my collar and a classmate asked me what it was, I quickly tucked it back under my shirt.

It took 27 years for me to understand what happened that first day of school in my mother's kitchen back in Tehran, that my father's words were not a lesson in treachery but rather a rite of passage, an initiation into a 2,700-year legacy of Iranian Jews.

Although Purim celebrates proud Jewish identity, perhaps our circumstances can be traced to Esther, who did not reveal her faith to King Ahasuerus. Esther did not reveal her people, for Mordecai told her not to. (Esther 2:10)

That first day of school, my father was handing down to me what by then was a long tradition of keeping a low profile in the face of harm or injury in dangerous times, a tradition carried out by our ancestors into Diaspora, so that I may survive and safeguard this ancient heritage and pass it on to the next generation of Esther's children.

Reprinted from Esther’s Children ©2002 by Houman Sarchar, published by The Jewish Publication Society with permission of the publisher.

Photo caption: TEHRAN’S MAHALLEH Photo by Antoine Sevruguin, c. 1880-1900. Mahalleh, meaning “quarter, district or neighborhood,” is the word widely used in Persian to refer to any given part of a city or town based on demographic (e.g. the jeweler’s district). The mahalleh-ye juhudha (the Jewish district) was called simply mahalleh by the Jews. In the area known as ‘Sar-e chal, the more wealthy Jews would buy a home at the end of one of the cul-de-sacs in the tight and narrow maze of alleys to gain more protection from the mobs during the periodic raids and lootings.