By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Not unlike her own watershed moment with her father, the women in Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s novel Three Daughters (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, October 2002, $25.00), daughters of a prominent conservative rabbi have to reconcile their own life’s disappointments with their father.
Pogrebin will be on Mercer Island to promote her newest book and first fiction novel, a story about three uncomfortably related Jewish half-sisters who eventually face a family catharsis of sorts at a family gathering on the eve of the new millennium.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s Women’s Division is co-sponsoring the evening with the renowned Jewish feminist, author, editor and co-founder of Ms. magazine during a free lecture and book signing at Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation on Sun., Nov. 16.
“The three daughters, Rachel, Leah and Shoshana Wasserman, are trying to find a way back to their enigmatic, charismatic father,” said Pogrebin in a phone interview with the Transcript.
As a child, Pogrebin herself turned her back on her religious life when she was not allowed to be the required tenth person in the nine-man prayer minyan in her home to mourn her mother’s early death.
“It’s never too late,” said Pogrebin. “Since my characters are quintessentially paradigms of Judaism, each represent a different approach to time and order which is a reoccurring theme.”
Shoshana, the youngest and most compulsively organized of the three, watches her life fall apart when her day planner is accidentally strewn about and demolished along a freeway.
“Shoshana is really losing time,” said Pogrebin. “Judaism is about ordering time and how we spend our time and how we spend our lives as well. Do we want to find a way back to one another? And, why can’t we be conscious of time all the time?”
The passing of time is also a theme in Pogrebin’s other works that include the best selling memoir, Getting Over Growing Older. To date, during her 44-year career, she has written nine books. Her first book, How To Make It in a Man’s World, written in 1970, predated her subsequent work on issues like women and employment, feminism, progressive child rearing, psychology and the role of women in the family. She also helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.
But her public work exploring and reconciling her personal Jewish values and her feminism have made an impact on women everywhere.
Her strong stand against anti-Semitism was evidenced by her written objections in Ms. and other publications to a 1975 United Nations Conference on Women’s platform that condemned Zionism as racism.
“I was raised in a Zionist household,” said Pogrebin, who was born and raised in a Conservative home in Queens, N.Y. She studied Torah and Talmud with her father. “I’ve been involved in countless Jewish organizations. I’ve been to Israel 22 times. I’ve been in refugee camps and I’ve been in Gaza. I’m interested in pro-peace groups. But there are women on all sides of the issues, across all lines.
“The women’s movement has worked very hard to grow and change,” added Pogrebin. “It’s not what it was before 1982. The women’s conference in Beijing was a very different world. Arabs and Jews worked together.”
Pogrebin’s other works have helped set the tone and raise the bar in society for women’s rights and gender equity through decades of activism. She has written to women about the benefits of union membership, sexism in religion and society and non-sexist child rearing.
“Since 1975 there has been tremendous erosion in unions, but the notion of collective bargaining is still important,” said Pogrebin. “For every man who makes a dollar a woman still makes 72 cents. If young women are not aware of it now, they will be when they hit the wall.”
Willing to see the glass half-full, the mother of three and grandmother of six takes a realistic but optimistic accounting of the successes.
“Fifty percent of the entering class at Harvard is women,” said Pogrebin. “There are two women on the Supreme Court. There are two women cops on my street corner. Progress is measurable. It’s a matter of how policy makers choose to see it.
“If you go around the country you will see, for instance, date-rape groups on campuses,” continued Pogrebin, “but they are not out in the streets like my generation was. There’s litigation. When women are discriminated on, they take to the courts in five seconds. Corporations know it’s going to cost them if they discriminate. They know they will pay.”
The lecture and book signing on Sunday runs from 7:30–9 p.m. and is open to the entire community. Registration is not required. The event is co-sponsored by Herzl-Ner Tamid. Contact 206-774-2259 or [email protected] for further information.