Rediscovering My Family History Through a Netflix Movie
Staring through the windows of "His Three Daughters."
It was the windows that tipped me off.
A few weeks back, after parenting duties were done for the evening, I turned on Netflix and selected Azazel Jacobs’ family drama His Three Daughters, starring Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen. The movie is about three bickering sisters drawn back to their father’s apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the days before his death, pulled into a series of shifting alliances that reflect how they simultaneously resent, fear, and misunderstand each other.
As Katie (Coon) confronted Rachel (Lyonne) about her smoking weed in the same apartment where their father lay dying, my eyes kept drifting away from the characters. The movie is an acting showcase and a tender evocation of familial bonds, but I found myself getting distracted, oddly, by the windows.
They were four rectangular panels in the far corner of the living room, one notably smaller than the others, edged into a small nook of their own. Where most apartments would center their windows, these looked as if the architect had decided to cordon them off. I recognized that design immediately, but I was convinced I was overreacting.
But then, Rachel huffily exiled herself from the apartment, smoking her blunt in the playground outside the building. She perched on a bench, a metal fence behind her enclosing a swing set bordering on a dank alley and an auto-repair shop, and I sat up straighter. I knew this playground. As Rachel fended off criticism from a well-meaning security guard, I found myself bathed in memories that the movie could not possibly know I would carry with me.
We called it “Bobbe’s special playground.” On sunny days, I would bring my children from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the F train, get off at East Broadway, and walk east on Grand Street until we passed the kosher pizza place and the fruit stand. We would enter the middle of the three buildings on the east side of the street. We would climb the stairs to the fourth floor to fetch my grandmother, then in her early nineties and still terrifyingly sharp, if a bit less fleet of foot than she had once been.
Together we would make our way back down to the street, step around the corner, and use a key to enter a private playground belonging only to the residents of the Hillman Houses, a former socialist co-op constructed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America for its employees in the late 1940s.
There, my grandmother (“Bobbe” is “grandma” in Yiddish) would claim a bench—not Rachel’s, one closer to the playground equipment and nearer the Grand Street entrance—and watch her grandchildren play. She was critical. She repeatedly told me that my older son was not playing heartily enough for her liking. She had suggestions for his technique on the seesaw.
My grandmother’s life had come full circle to bring her to this playground. She had grown up in the neighborhood, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, attending nearby Seward Park High School, taking the train across the East River to Brooklyn for afternoon Hebrew school, where she learned a version of the Hebrew language so fanatically precise that when I was a child, she would regularly look over my homework and tell me to correct my Hebrew teachers’ grammar and punctuation. (I didn’t.) She had spent the bulk of her adult life elsewhere—Baltimore, Providence, Far Rockaway, Jerusalem—before returning to the Lower East Side when my grandfather got sick and eventually died, and spending the last two decades in her one-bedroom efficiency apartment in Hillman.
His Three Daughters is redolent with the weight of familial history. A single tense discussion between the sisters about whether Rachel is to inherit their father’s apartment is marked by the hulking presence of a decidedly lumpy, beige-colored couch where Katie sits, and a bland pastoral landscape on the wall behind her head. The sisters alternately whisper and shout, all while we remain forever aware that their father is out of sight in the back bedroom, dying. Soon, all that will be left of him is this ugly, mismatched stuff, precious to them and no one else. We know, even if they do not yet, that they are angry at each other because of the loss that they are contemplating, and not yet ready to face.
His Three Daughters is about what it feels like to bear witness to the passing of an entire era in the body of a single person. My grandmother was that person for me. Born in 1923 in Lithuania, she lived long enough to vote against Donald Trump in 2016. Until practically the last months of her life, she read the New York Times daily and was anxious to debate politics and current events any time I saw her. We hardly ever agreed about anything, except Trump.
After moving to New York in 2001, I would come by my grandmother’s apartment every few weeks, replace light bulbs, fix knotted telephone cords, and put in new batteries in the remote controls. (I drew the line at helping my grandmother find Fox News on the TV, although I gave in sometimes.) We would sit at her table, me in my jeans and sneakers, her with her sheitel, debating George W. Bush or West Bank settlers or Eliot Spitzer, and I was reminded, time and again, how lucky I was to be an adult still in possession of a grandparent, a living connection to a time that felt like it only belonged in history books.
I would eat my grandmother’s eggs-and-onions, her dense slabs of whitefish, the potatoes, the dry but mysteriously delicious chocolate babka she served, and as my stomach pressed against my waistband, and I resolved to never eat anything other than celery ever again, I would hear the same cycle of stories: about my great-grandfather, who would sneak out in the middle of the night to buy cigarettes, and died too young of lung cancer; about my grandfather, a young rabbi, and his worries about finding a job; about my great aunt, who had scandalously met her husband, a legendary Torah scholar, while riding the subway. Each story was like one of the items of furniture in the movie’s apartment, lumpy and misshapen with use, but beautiful to me nonetheless.
Director Azazel Jacobs, himself the son of legendary avant-garde director Ken Jacobs, seems to know that same feeling, and imbues His Three Daughters with all the heartache and tension and anguish that comes with inheriting the legacy of someone you love.
Unlike the paterfamilias of His Three Daughters, my grandmother didn’t die inside her apartment. After a steady descent over the last year of her life, she died in a Manhattan hospital in January 2019, just shy of her ninety-sixth birthday. The movie’s sense of anxious waiting, of knowing that the time had come, and waiting with a combination of sadness and impatience for it to arrive, felt immediately familiar nonetheless. Katie wrestles with writing an obituary for their father, her flowery words falling short of the mark. Eventually, she calls in Rachel for a more plainspoken, effective approach to their father’s life.
My grandmother’s funeral was around the corner from Hillman, at the Bialystoker Synagogue, with its lavish zodiac murals, and the rumors that it might have once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. I was one of the only male attendees not wearing a black hat. For my eulogy, I called up some words from the opening scene of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America that felt apropos for her life:
“She was not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania—and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted.”
A few people came up to me after the funeral to ask for the name of the play I had quoted, and I may have elected not to inform the ultra-Orthodox attendees what the rest of Angels in America was about.
The movie approaches its conclusion with a scene in which the three sisters, battered and bruised, join each other once more on that lumpy couch, Rachel putting her head in the lap of Christina (Olsen). Christina begins singing a nursery rhyme while stroking Rachel’s hair, and we suspect that this might have been a song that their father sang to them when they were children.
The moment reminded me that my grandmother would sing songs to my children on our visits, sitting on a couch every bit as lumpy and unattractive as the one in the movie. The songs were the same Hebrew melodies she had sung to me when I had been their age, thirty-plus years prior.
Artists never know the resonances we might bring to our encounter with their work. His Three Daughters was not made for me personally, nor did Azazel Jacobs seek to tell my story. But it was hard not to watch this movie about a dying elder, and the people left behind, and not think about my own complicated history in these very same spaces.
I rarely walk along that stretch of Grand Street anymore. I haven’t been to Bobbe’s special playground since she died. His Three Daughters allowed me to peek through a window into my own past, and look at the places I had been, and those I had lost.
This movie felt personal to me for reasons that I would share with practically no one else, but the shock of recognition—underscored by a brief shot of the Hillman sign at the very end of the movie—reminded me that good art is always, in some fashion or another, meant to make us jolt upright and say, “I’ve sat on that same bench.”
His Three Daughters is available on Netflix.
Saul, I read this with a throbbing lump in my throat. Such incredibly meaningful words and beautiful storytelling. This really stayed with me: "His Three Daughters allowed me to peek through a window into my own past, and look at the places I had been, and those I had lost."
Also, I could not love this more: "She repeatedly told me that my older son was not playing heartily enough for her liking. She had suggestions for his technique on the seesaw."
This is so beautiful, Saul! I want to pass out from the heady combination of culture, personal resonance, politics, religion, and grief.