One afternoon, working at home in Portland, Oregon, I took a break to check my email and found a new message:

To: Susan C Faludi

Date: 7/7/2004

Subject: Changes.

It was from my father. “Dear Susan,” it began, “I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.”

Attached was a series of snapshots. In the first, my 76-year-old father is standing in a hospital lobby in a sheer, sleeveless chemise and red skirt. The caption read: “I look tired after the surgery.” In another, taken before “the surgery”, my father is perched amid a copse of trees, modelling a henna wig with bangs and a pale ruffled blouse. The caption read, “Stefánie in Vienna garden.” The email was signed, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.”

My father and I had barely spoken in a quarter-century. As a child, I had resented and, later, feared him, and when I was a teenager he had left the family – or, rather, been forced to leave by the police – after a season of escalating violence. Despite our long alienation, I thought I understood enough of his character to have had some inkling of an inclination this profound. I had none.

My father had seemed invested – insistently, inflexibly – in being the household despot

As a child, in the suburban town of Yorktown Heights, an hour’s drive north of Manhattan, I had always known my father to assert the male prerogative. He had seemed invested – insistently, inflexibly – in being the household despot. We ate what he wanted to eat, travelled where he wanted to go, wore what he wanted us to wear. There was no escape.

Early one August morning when I was 14, I was lacing my sneakers in the front hall, preparing for a run (I’d joined the junior varsity girls’ track team), when I sensed a subtle atmospheric change, like the drop in barometric pressure as a cold front approaches, which signalled to my aggrieved adolescent mind the arrival of my father. His pale, thin frame emerged from the gloom at the bend of the stairs. He was wearing jogging shorts and tennis sneakers. “I am running also,” he said, his thick Hungarian accent stretching out the first syllable: “aaaalso”. It was an insistence, not an offer. I pushed through the screen door, my father shadowing my heels. The air was fat with humidity. Tar bubbles blistered the blacktop.

By the lake, we picked up a narrow footpath. We ran without speaking, single file. Minutes into the ascent, he picked up his pace. So did I. He pulled ahead, then I did. We both gasped for breath. My stomach was heaving and my vision had blurred. My father broke into a furious stride. I tried to match it. It was, after all, the early 1970s; I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar) played on the mental soundtrack of my morning jogs. But neither my ardour for women’s lib nor my youth nor all my training could compete with his determination.

Something about my father became palpable in that moment, but what? Was I witnessing raw aggression or a performance of it? Was he competing with his daughter or outracing someone, or something, else? These weren’t questions I’d have formulated that morning. At the time, I was trying not to retch. But I remember the thought, troubling to my budding feminism, that flickered through my mind: it’s easier to be a woman.

And with it, I let my legs slow. My father’s back receded down the road.

***

In September 2004, two months after receiving my father’s email, I boarded a plane to Hungary. In my luggage were a tape recorder, a jumbo pack of AA batteries, two dozen microcassettes, a stack of reporter’s notebooks and a single-spaced 10-page list of questions. She had asked me to write her story.

I was setting out to investigate someone I scarcely knew. I was largely ignorant of the life my father had led since my parents’ divorce in 1977, when he’d moved to a loft in Manhattan that doubled as his commercial photographer’s studio, and subsequently repatriated to Hungary. Since then, I had seen him only occasionally, once at a graduation, again at a family wedding, and once when he was passing through the west coast.

In the arrivals hall at Budapest Ferihegy international airport, I reluctantly scanned the faces. Maybe she wouldn’t be here. Maybe I could turn around and fly home. Salutations in two genders were gridlocked on my tongue. I wasn’t sure I was ready to release him to a new identity; she hadn’t explained the old one. I can manage a change in pronoun, I thought, but paternity? Whoever she was now, she was, as she had said to me on the phone, “still your father”.

I spotted a familiar profile with a high forehead and narrow shoulders. Her hair looked thicker than I remembered his, and lighter in colour, a henna-red. She was wearing a red cabled sweater, grey flannel skirt, white heels and a pair of pearl stud earrings.

“Waaall,” my father said, as I came to a stop in front of her. We exchanged an awkward hug. Her breasts – 48C, she would later inform me – poked into mine. Rigid, they seemed less bosom than battlement, and I wondered at my own inflexibility. Barely off the plane, I was already rendering judgment. As if there weren’t plenty of “real” women walking around with silicone in their breasts. Since when had I become the essentialist?

She led the way to the car park. I trailed behind, watching uncomfortably the people watching us. The dissonance between white heels and male-pattern baldness was drawing notice. Some double-chinned matrons gave my father the up-and-down. One stopped in her tracks and muttered something. I didn’t understand the words, but I got the intent. When her gaze shifted to me, I glared back. Fuck off, you old biddy, I thought.

Susan Faludi in her father’s car in New York City, early 1960s. Photograph: Courtesy of Susan Faludi

Growing up, I learned very little about the paternal side of my family. I knew a few fundamentals. I knew my father’s birth name, István Friedman. He had adopted Faludi after the second world war, then Steven – or Steve, as he preferred – after he’d moved to the US in 1953.

I knew he was born and raised Jewish in Budapest, and was a child of privilege. My grandparents lived off inherited wealth and went out every night to the theatre, concerts, galas at the opera. A series of nannies and servants raised their only child. My grandfather owned a villa in Buda, where the Friedmans spent the summer, and two luxurious apartment buildings in Pest, where they occupied the largest unit; my father referred to it as the “royal apartment”.

All my life I had the man without the context. Now I had the context, but with a hitch. The man was gone

I knew, too, that my father was a teenager during the Nazi occupation. But in all the years we lived under the same roof, he spoke of only a few instances from wartime Hungary. In one, it is winter and dead bodies litter the street. My father sees the frozen carcass of a horse and hacks off pieces to eat. In another, my father is on a boulevard in Pest when a man in uniform orders him into a hotel. Jews are being shot in the basement. My father survives by hiding in the stairwell. In a third, my father “saves” his parents. How? I’d ask, hungry for details. Shrug.

“Waaall. I had an armband.” And? “And… I saaaved them.”

As my father’s campervan climbed the roads from the airport, I thought, here I am in the city that was the forge of my father’s youth, the anvil on which his character was struck. Now it was the stage set of her prodigal return. This proximity gave me a strange sensation. All my life I’d had the man without the context. Now I had the context, but with a hitch. The man was gone.

A house loomed into view, a three-storey concrete bunker with a peaked roof and stuccoed walls. A security fence ringed the perimeter, with a locked and alarmed gate. My father yanked on the brake and scrambled down from the pilot’s seat. We stood in the drive while she deactivated various security alarms, which she reactivated as soon as we got inside.

I was shown to my room and left to unpack. Ten minutes later, there was a summons from the adjoining bedroom. “Susaaan, come here!”

She was standing before a dressing table with a mirror framed in vanity lights. I recognised it: the makeup table that used to sit in my father’s photo studio in Manhattan. She held an outfit in each hand, a yellow sundress and a navy blue frock with a sailor-suit collar. “Which should I wear?”

I said I didn’t know. And thought, petulantly: change your clothes all you want, you’re still the same person.

“It’s hot out – I’ll wear the sundress.” She started peeling off her top. I backed toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To unpack.”

“Oh, come now,” she said, half in, half out of her blouse. “We’re all women here.”

She pulled the top over her head and gestured toward the closet. “Help me pick out the shoes.”

I stood in the threshold, one foot in, one foot out.

My father gave me a familiar half-grin. “Come closer, I won’t bite!”

***

One evening in the early winter of 1976, an event occurred that would mark my childhood for ever. I was in my room, nodding over a book, when I was jolted awake by a loud crash. Someone was breaking in, and then pounding up the stairs with blood-curdling howls. It was my father, violating a restraining order. I heard wood splintering, a door giving way before a baseball bat. Then screams, a thudding noise. “Call the police!” my mother cried as she fled past my room.

The paramedics carried out on a stretcher the man my mother had recently begun seeing. His shirt was soaked in blood and he had gone into shock. My father had attacked him with the bat, then with the Swiss army knife he always carried. The stabbings, in the stomach, were multiple. It took the doctors the better part of the night to staunch the bleeding. Getting the blood out of the house took longer. It was everywhere: on floors, walls, stairs, the front hall. The living room looked like a scene out of Carrie, which, as it happened, had just premiered that fall. When the house went on the market a year later, my mother and I were still trying to scrub stains from the carpet.

In the subsequent divorce trial, my father claimed to be a wronged husband who had entered the house to “save” his family from a trespasser. The judge granted a request to pay no alimony and just $50 (£35) a week for the support of two children.

As I confronted, nearly three decades and nine time zones away, my father’s new self, it was hard for me to purge that image of the violent man from her new persona. Was I supposed to believe the one identity had been erased by the other?

Susan Faludi and her father cycling in the Alps, 1972. Photograph: Courtesy of Susan Faludi

If someone were to ask me to declare my identity, I’d say that, along with such ordinaries as nationality and profession, I am a woman and I am a Jew. Yet when I look deeper, I begin to doubt the grounds on which I can make the claim. I am a woman who has managed to bypass most of the rituals of traditional femininity. I never had children; I didn’t yearn for maternity. I am an indifferent cook, rarely garden, never sew.

I am a Jew who knows next to nothing of Jewish law, ritual, prayers. I never attended Hebrew school; I wasn’t batmitzvahed. We never belonged to the one synagogue in Yorktown Heights, which, anyway, was so loosey-goosey Reform it might as well have been Unitarian. My mother is Jewish only on her father’s side, a lack of matrilineage that renders me gentile to all but the most liberal wing of the rabbinate.

So if my allegiance to these identities isn’t fused in observance and ritual, what is its source? I am a Jew who grew up in a neighbourhood populated with antisemites. I am a woman whose girlhood was steeped in the sexist stereotypes of early 1960s America. My sense of who I am seems to derive from a quality of resistance, a refusal to back down. If it’s threatened, I’ll assert it.

If I am someone with only the vaguest idea of what it means to be a Jew, who is nevertheless adamant that she is one, my father was the reverse. She was someone who had been reminded at every turn that she was a Jew, who was nevertheless adamant that her identity lay elsewhere.

***

When I lured my father out of her house in the Buda hills (never an easy task), she gravitated to the generic shopping centres and retail outlets. I visited her numerous times over the next 10 years, and we walked together only once through Budapest’s Jewish quarter, site of the infamous and murderous wartime ghetto, and then only on the way to her favourite wiener schnitzel restaurant.

It was September 2004. On the way back, and at my insistence, we stepped into the Hungarian Jewish Museum. My father’s mood, already sour at this detour, curdled when we reached the Holocaust room. Alongside deportation rosters and a nation-by-nation breakdown of the death toll (Hungary: 565,000 Jews perished) was a large photograph of the Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy, a man my father revered, though he’d overseen the deporting of nearly a half million Jews to Auschwitz in the spring and summer of 1944. Horthy was shaking hands with Hitler.

My request that my father translate the text on some second world war street posters – grotesque caricatures of rich Jewish men with jug ears and giant hooked noses, their wives in diamonds and furs – elicited her customary wave. “This is of no interest,” she said. She was ready to go.

Just before the exit, she jolted to a halt. In front of her was a photograph, a grainy black-and-white image of a muddy yard in which a group of men in fedoras and raincoats stood behind a small wooden table. It was the grounds of the Jewish Maros Street hospital where, on 11 January 1945, all but one of its 93 patients, nurses and doctors were murdered. In front of the table were three rows of bodies, exhumed from a mass grave by the Soviets a few weeks after the liberation of Budapest.

“I was there,” my father said quietly. The Soviet soldiers had invited a newly organised youth film club to witness the exhumation. My father was one of its charter members.

So many of the pictures of my father’s life were missing, lost in the rubble or wilfully purged from her recollection. Here on the wall was a moment she couldn’t expunge. “The smell,” she said, raising her hand to her face. “You could not get it out of your nose.”

'Susaaan! Come here! I want you to see this.' She hit the play button. A surgery was under way. Hers

“Susaaan!” My father was standing at the foot of the stairs. “Susaaan!” I had retreated to my room with a book. “Susaaan! Come here! I want you to see this.”

She was waiting for me in the hallway. Reluctantly, I followed her into the living room. “Sit there,” she said, waving the remote toward a chair. She settled into another and hit the play button. On the TV screen, an operating theatre appeared. The camera wheeled around, then zoomed in on a bloody midsection. A surgery was under way. Hers.

“I don’t want to see this.”

“It’s well done,” my father said. “I sent a copy to my endocrinologist, and he found it very interesting.”

“I still don’t want to see it.”

But I sat there watching anyway. All I could think of was a cooking show, Julia Child in surgical scrubs: slice the fish lengthwise. Fillet with a well-sharpened paring knife. Set aside the skin for later. At least Julia would have been armed with a stiff drink.

After a few minutes, I studied the floor.

“You’re not watching!”

I raised my head, keeping my eyelids at half mast, which didn’t block the soundtrack, a tinkly medley that repeated every 10 seconds. “It’s Thai pop,” my father said. “They put it on there for me.”

The hospital staff had agreed to record the breast implants and penectomy. “They only did the highlights,” my father said. The film clicked off. I got up and left the room.

***

In the autumn of 2014, my father and I climbed the wide steps of the Hungarian National Museum. For two hours we navigated the vast maze of the museum’s second floor, where the official history of Hungary unfolded in 20 marbled rooms. The museum preserved Hungary’s characteristic evasion of its role in the war and the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. The memorabilia relating to Jewish annihilation pointed largely to German culpability: a photo of Eichmann striking a Jewish man, SS regalia, a dummy of a Gestapo officer on a very real BMW motorbike.

We descended to the basement. In the corridor leading to the restroom, a placard caught my father’s eye. It read, “Survivors”. We stepped in and found a small, windowless room housing a temporary exhibit. On the walls were a series of portraits of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, mounted for Hungary’s Holocaust Memorial Year, a belated and begrudging attempt by the government to apologise for its role.

My father gazed around the room in confusion, Alice fallen down the rabbit hole. She walked over to the first portrait and, without my prompting, began to translate the accompanying text. It was an account from a survivor born a year later than my father. Dina Friedman and her family had been deported to Auschwitz at the end of May 1944, along with the 5,000 Jews who lived in the north-eastern town of Nyíregyháza. “There we lost our parents and our humanity was stolen from us,” my father read, and her voice echoed through the nearly empty room. “It never occurred to us to return to Hungary.” It was a long testimony. After a few minutes, a guard came over and suggested that my father buy the text in the gift shop instead of reading it aloud. My father gave her a cutting look and carried on. Her eyes were burning.

We made a slow circuit of the room. My father came to a halt in front of a photograph of the descendants of Dina Friedman in Israel: 16 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren were gathered around an aged couple in a clearing in the Jerusalem forest. “Let the people in Hungary look at them!” my father burst out. “They turned their back. They said, ‘Waaall, it’s none of our business.’ They never looked at who was taken. These people were just like them. They were your neighbours. They were your friends. And you let them die!” She said she’d seen enough.

We walked half a block before she spoke again. “But to have that exhibit in the National Museum! Fantastic. It’s very praiseworthy.” After a few more paces, as if in response to another voice in her head, “Waaall, but it’s in the cellar.” She gave a rueful snort. “If they had a visitors’ book, I would write in it, ‘Thank you! Thank you for putting the Jews in the cellar!’”

Susan Faludi’s father as a young professional photographer, just after the second world war. Photograph: Courtesy of Susan Faludi

“I love this place,” my father declared. “It’s aaauthentic Hungarian.” She, my husband and I were waiting for a table at the Fish-Farm Inn, where my father liked to order the halászlé, a traditional spicy fish soup larded with enough paprika to burn out your brain on the first sip. My father especially loved the old-school waiters, elderly gents with formal manners, greeting her with courtly gallantry and pulling out her chair, addressing her with the vintage salutation of men to women: “Kezét csókolom” (I kiss your hand).

Did they find her womanly? As usual, she wasn’t wearing a wig. Her white purse was slung like a sailor’s duffel over her blue double-breasted captain’s jacket, an ocean-faring motif for a seafood dinner perhaps.

My father tilted her pate coquettishly and chatted away to the grizzled server, who was all smiles and obsequious nods. When the waiter left the table, I remarked on his deference.

“Waaall, they have to csókolom me now.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m tough.”

I decided to exercise some toughness of my own. I announced I was forgoing the fish soup. “It’s made the correct way here,” my father insisted, and proceeded to wear me down with a characteristic free-floating filibuster: “Halászlé should only be made with river fish. Or lake fish – Lake Balaton’s the largest freshwater lake in...”

I said I’d try the soup.

The waiter arrived with a cast-iron kettle and began ladling out its contents, starting with my father’s bowl. “Ladies first!” my father quipped. She looked pleased with her own sophistry.

My father had rescued his parents in 1944, by pretending to be a fascist. 'I took part in their game'

“Balaton,” she said. “That’s how we ended up hearing it on the radio.”

A conversation with her was like a ride in a run-amok submersible. One minute you were bobbing on the surface; the next trawling the ocean floor. Now she was back in the summer of ’44, when my father and grandfather hid in a doctor’s apartment, while the doctor holidayed at Lake Balaton; they listened “very quietly” to the BBC.

“That’s how we heard the Germans had taken away the Jews of Kassa,” she said now. My grandfather’s hometown. “My father started to cry. He told me, ‘They have killed my parents.’”

“Did he try to get his parents out?” I asked.

My father studied the tablecloth and said nothing. “Aaanywaaay,” she said finally, “he couldn’t have known.”

That they would be murdered, she meant. “It was something that had never happened before.”

“You did something,” I said. “You saved your parents.” By then, I’d extracted the details of my father’s 1944 rescue of his parents from an endangered “safe house”. Wearing a fascist armband and carrying an unloaded rifle, he’d given the Arrow Cross guards the party salute and goose-stepped his parents out of the building.

That was different, my father said. “I believed it. So they believed it.” The Arrow Cross, she meant. “I took part in their game. If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be, you’re halfway saved. But if you act funny, if you act afraid, you’re halfway to the gas chamber.”

For dessert, my father ordered gesztenyepüré, pureed chestnuts laced with rum and vanilla, served in a gigantic goblet. “This role-playing during the war,” my father said as she tackled the towering confection, “that was a similar process.”

“To what?”

“I can sit down with anyone now, and he kisses my hand. It strengthened me for life that I did these things back then. That I could live as not myself but as a non-Jewish person. And that I could get away with it. So now I can do this other thing.” Meaning her change in sex. “Because if you are convinced you are this other person, everybody else will be convinced.”

“So what you’re doing now,” I asked, “is that playing another role, too?”

“I was role-playing as a man,” she said, “but I wasn’t totally accepted by women as a capital-letter – ‘M’ – man. I didn’t have the wherewithal. Now, as a woman, I’m not role-playing any more.”

“Because this is who you were all along?”

“Waaall, it’s who I am now,” she said. “Since the operation. I have developed another personality.”

“Which has been easier for you,” I asked, “to be accepted as a woman after being born a man, or to be accepted as a Magyar after being born a Jew?”

My father thought about it, holding her spoon before her like a hand mirror. “As a woman. Because I am a woman, with a birth certificate that says I’m a woman. So I must be a woman.”

My father polished off her dessert. “So, is the inquisition over now?” She grinned and waved her spoon. “The Lives And Crimes Of Stefánie Faludi! Oh my God!”

We filed out into the night air. The Danube lay before us, obsidian in darkness. My father tugged at my sleeve. “Getting away with it,” she said. “Susaaan, don’t forget that line. That’s the key to it all. Because a lot of people got discovered that they were Jewish, and they were shot.”

The campervan careened down a dark and potholed boulevard along the river. We were lost, though my father wouldn’t admit it. She had asked me to come with her to a transgender disco in an abandoned factory.

After a half-hour of wrong turns, we arrived. In the lot were fewer than a dozen cars. My father seemed nervous, checking and rechecking her hair and makeup in the rearview mirror. A heavy rain drummed on the van’s roof. We made a run for it.

Together in Budapest, 2010. Photograph: Russ Rymer

A set of steep, worn cement steps led up to what was once a locker room and dressing area for employees. Bed sheets had been pinned to clotheslines to create a few private spaces. Each of the cubicles bore a hand-drawn sign. “Makeup room”, my father translated. “Changing room”, said another. And, in the farthest corner: “Conversation nook”, containing a couple of gone-to-seed armchairs and a table. American techno blasted from the speakers. The dancefloor was empty.

My father cast about for a familiar face. Seeing none, she led the way to a corner sofa. “THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE A STAGE SHOW,” my father yelled over the booming soundtrack. “IT STARTS AT MIDNIGHT.”

I checked my wristwatch. It was 10 o’clock.

Much to my amazement, my father fell into conversation, or at least a monologue, with a partygoer seated on her other side. Chloe wore a teased red wig, tube top and vinyl micro-mini.

“WHAT ARE YOU TWO TALKING ABOUT?” I shouted. Michael Jackson’s Thriller was drowning out every other word.

“ME, OF COURSE!” my father said. “I’M TELLING CHLOE ABOUT MY SURGERY.”

My head was beginning to pound. Midnight came and went without a stage show.

“WHY ISN’T ANYONE DANCING?” I asked as the hands on my watch inched towards 1am.

My father shrugged and her mouth moved.

“WHAT?”

“I SAID, ‘THEY ARE TOO SHY.’”

It was half past one when, one by one, a few guests ventured on to the dancefloor. For a quarter-hour, my father studied their movements.

Then she handed me her purse and joined them.

I watched as she and eventually a half-dozen others gyrated in place, each in their own bubble, dancing by themselves. My mind travelled to the weekends in my adolescence when my father had tried to teach me how to waltz, and excoriated me for leading.

She looked so alone out there. Everyone looked so alone. I got up off the couch. My father and I circled around each other for a few minutes.

Then I put out my hand and she took it. I couldn’t teach her the female steps to a Viennese waltz, but I’d done my time in New York’s Limelight. I knew what to do with Michael Jackson. I led her through a few moves and soon we were swinging each other around. It occurred to me that I hadn’t danced like this in ages. It occurred to me that I was having a good time.

My father was grinning, and not that anxious half-grin she so often had on her face. I held up my arm and she twirled underneath it like a pro.

• Stefánie Faludi died in Budapest in May 2015, aged 87.

This is an edited extract from In The Darkroom, by Susan Faludi, published by William Collins at £16.99. To order a copy go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.