Three Daughters
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
(Sr. Associate Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
2002 Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 0374276609
Three completely different sisters, play out their shifting loyalties in a Jewish family enmeshed in a web of secrets & lies.
Three Daughters is also a bitingly funny first novel about how memory shapes behavior, the pressing need to understand one's past, & the conflict between security & freedom. Confronting old wounds & forging new bonds, the sisters slowly come together as a newly actualized force.
Sr. Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma H. Bond writes:
Three Daughters is the story of Jewish sisters, each of whom differs vastly from the others in appearance, height, philosophy, & lifestyle They are alike only in that none of them have become their mother.
At the beginning of the book, Rachel, the oldest, is a beautiful, wealthy, athletic woman, who floats on the surface of her Long Island life, denying that her handsome husband Jeremy (“a Clark Gable look-alike, only taller, with magic fingers and a prick that never quit”) is a philanderer. Rachel was one of those women of her times whose center revolved around her husband & children, who was unable to face the idea of living alone. In the course of the book, she learns to accept reality, dares to leave Jeremy, & cultivates a core of her own. It becomes clear as the character develops that denial of reality had kept her thinking on a superficial level of couture fashion & competitive entertainment, & that when she becomes able to face the truth, her true intelligence flourishes. As a result, she decides to go back to school & become a rabbi.
Leah, two years younger & a complete contrast to Rachel in appearance & personality, is the most interesting character in the book. She actually was Rachel's step-sister, the child of her father Sam's first wife, Deena, a psychotic woman who by threatening violence, was able to steal Leah away from Sam. An intellectual college professor, a champion for the rights of the downtrodden, an activist for civil rights & an ardent feminist, Leah is a blunt, witty, painfully honest, physically unappealing woman, who corrects everyone's grammar as well as their thinking. She is basically a fine person who works for the good of human kind, but happens to have an unpleasant character as a result of her traumatic upbringing. She has kinky graying hair, dresses in a Bohemian black wardrobe (leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans, a shoelace that secures her waist-length braid, & Birkinstocks or ankle-high sneakers.) When Deena takes Leah away from her father, she never forgives him for abandoning her, & doesn't talk to him for fifty years. Sam, a famous rabbi who lives in Israel, is called to New York to receive a prestigious award on his ninetieth birthday, which happens on the millennium. The efforts of the sisters trying to get Leah & Sam to reconcile makes up much of the plot. Leah who skewers anyone who comes too close with her rude, blunt ways, foul-mouthed language & marvelous wit, softens under the love of her sisters, & becomes more like her now admired older sibling.
This review would be incomplete without giving a few examples of Leah's delightful wit. For instance, she said that her students' knowledge of foreign affairs “stems mainly from their having breakfasted at the International House of Pancakes.” Her idea of “a balanced diet was an Oreo in each hand.” She said about marriage that “A woman starts out sinking into his arms but ends up with her arms in his sink.” As her son Henry put it, “his mother was too busy changing the world to change the sheets.” When Rachel mentioned that women are now permitted to serve as sandeks (those trained to do circumcisions), Leah retorted with “I can hear the Orthos now: Don't trust your son's pecker to a feminist!” When asked where she wanted to sit in a restaurant, she quips, “I'd like a table near a waiter.” Largely because of Leah's wit, the book is fun to read.
Shoshanna, the baby of the family, is twelve years younger than Rachel, & lived much of her life not knowing that Leah existed. Originally a conventional girl like Rachel, when Leah charges back into the family's life, Shoshanna idolizes her, identifies with her, & becomes her feminist clone. Much of her development is characterized by the struggle about which sister she will emulate, the beauty or the activist. Her conflict is acted out by her sisters, who compete for possession of Shoshanna's mind. Although she changes less drastically than either Rachel or Leah, by the end of the book Shoshanna, too, is able to find her own identity. She becomes less of a control freak, & refrains from rushing in to fix whatever would upset a family member. She simply grew “to accept the woman she was, intrepid, cautious, decent, and fundamentally content with her lot.”
Lies & subterfuge characterized the family life of the sisters & befuddled their sense of reality. The lie that their parents had never been married before, the lie that Leah was a cousin from Chicago, & the lies of the philandering Jeremy all served to warp the maturation of the sisters. The unraveling of the lies & the facing of the truth helps all three women to become more genuine, authentic people.
The author, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, is a lecturer on Jewish issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which Leah expounds on a great deal in the book), & an ardent feminist who was a co-founder of Ms magazine. Indeed, Three Daughters gives an excellent history of the feminist movement. Her deep & profound knowledge is most evident in the character of Leah, who is seeped in the history & meaning of the two systems of belief. Pogrebin cleverly manages to reconcile the two, by having Rachel preside over a seder which is not only headed by a woman, but is completely rewritten from a feminist point of view. One would think that the children of a rabbi might rebel by overthrowing all religious beliefs. But all three sisters are deeply religious women, able to endow each of the ancient rituals with personal & often elegant meaning. An unprecedented meeting of the old & the new takes place in the women, as the archaic customs of Judaism are practiced side by side with modern thinking. As an example, when the future rabbi leaves Jeremy, she doesn't hesitate to tell her sister that she is a confirmed onanist.
This reviewer enjoyed the book, with two minor exceptions. For one, it seemed awfully long, & would have been better if cut by a hundred pages. Secondly, while the Yiddish language is unsurpassed in finding the precise word to express one's meaning, this reader found the constant repetition of Yiddish words annoying, as would too frequent use of French, Spanish, or any other foreign language. For instance, do many Jewish people today actually know the meaning of Oyfn Pripetshik, Tikkun olam, afikomen, & sandek?
Three Daughters is an interesting book in its characterizations, its historical depth, & its information about Judaism, feminism, & the Civil Rights movements. It may well be the most thorough study of sisters since 1900 when Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters, a beautiful play about character, relationships, & motivation, regarded by some critics as the best drama of the twentieth century.
Three Daughters is recommended for all who like a good story, well-developed portrayals, & the history of progressive movements in the United States in the late twentieth century.
More from Letty Cottin Pogrebin: Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America; Getting over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey; Getting Yours: How to Make the System Work for the Working Woman; Family Politics: Love and Power on an Intimate Frontier; Among friends: who we like, why we like them, and what we do with them; How to make it in a man's world
(01/12/03)
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