Three Daughters - Hardcover

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374276609 ISBN 13: 9780374276607

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

An ebullient novel about family secrets and the triumph of sisterly love

Driven by a legacy of lies, the shame of their own imperfections, and impending chaos in each of their well-ordered married lives, the three Wasserman daughters struggle with themselves and one another to break their parents' silence and understand their past.

Shoshanna, control freak and world-class problem solver, stands on the brink of a Big Birthday in the shadow of the Evil Eye, trying to enjoy her happiness and to overcome her fears while also engineering a double reconciliation between her estranged sisters, and between Leah and their rabbi father. Leah, a brilliant English professor and unreconstructed leader of the left, eloquent and foul-mouthed, a crusading feminist and a passionately conflicted wife and mother, grapples with the meaning of abandonment and the unfamiliar demands of her own roiling needs. Rachel, who has papered over her losses with an athlete's discipline, a fact fetishist's sense of order, and a pragmatism bordering on self-sacrifice, watches her carefully constructed world fall apart and in the rubble discovers the woman she was meant to be.

Three Daughters is a rich and complex story of three lives, their loves, and the web of relationships that either hold these lives together or hopelessly entangle them.

About this title

About the Author

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the co-founder of Ms. magazine, a nationally known lecturer, and author of eight books of nonfiction, most recently Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America and Getting Over Getting Older, a memoir. Three Daughters is her first novel. She lives with her husband in New York City.

Reviews

Augmenting a prolific career as memoirist, commentator and editor (she was a founding editor of Ms.), Pogrebin has crafted a first novel that embraces her favorite themes. (Her most recent nonfiction titles Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America and Getting Over Getting Older could serve as subtitles for this book.) The eponymous daughters are the progeny of Rabbi Sam Wasserman, whose impending return from Israel to the States for his 90th birthday proves a defining event for his family. Leah, the oldest, born of Sam's first marriage to crazy Dena, knows it's now or never to reconcile with her father. Brilliant and brooding, a dark star of second-wave feminism, Leah touchingly metamorphoses into a different brand of strong woman, able to appreciate and lean on her less doctrinal sisters. Rachel, the second in line, is Sam's stepchild, the daughter of Sam's second wife, Esther, who was his great love. Adopted and adored by Sam, Rachel has inherited his ardor for the Torah. As the novel progresses, she is transformed from a needlepoint-working, factoid-spouting rich man's wife into a flinty divorcee heading for the seminary. As for Shoshanna, the youngest, born to Sam and Esther, "[her] challenge was simply to accept that the woman she was was the woman she would likely remain intrepid, cautious, decent, and fundamentally content with her lot." Talky, smart, hopeful and empathic, this will be a must-read for Pogrebin's contemporaries.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Of course these three daughters are estranged, but crusading optimist Shoshanna intends to smooth things over with brilliant, angry Leah and withdrawn Rachel.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pogrebin, one of the founders of Ms. magazine and the author of numerous works of nonfiction, offers a dazzling debut novel. The three middle-aged Wasserman sisters share a dysfunctional background but no longer have very much in common. After their father, an esteemed rabbi who has relocated to Israel, announces he will return to New York for the millennium and wishes to celebrate with his three daughters, it is up to Shoshanna, the professional problem solver, to orchestrate a reunion of the estranged family members. Ironically, just as she resolves to achieve this minor miracle, the superorganized Shoshanna loses her precious Filofax and with it control of her well-regulated life. As she struggles with both major and mundane problems, her two older sisters must reconcile with the demons of their pasts in order to face each other and their long-absent father. Pogrebin does a superb job of interweaving several complex personal histories into a humorous and heartbreakingly honest family melodrama. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374276609
• ISBN 13: 9780374276607
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400