Generational Trauma, Time Shenanigans and Jewish Ghosts
Russian Doll season 2 promotional material, Netflix
This article was first published on April 25th, 2022 on Falwriting.com It was originally edited by Conrad Gardner. Some changes have been made.
Sometime in February 2019, my dad and I started watching Russian Doll, Netflix’s new Groundhog Day-style show in which a New York socialite keeps dying and reliving the same day. My dad fell asleep halfway through the second episode and I figured, if he’s not watching with me, there’s not really any point. We’ve seen this story before, Happy Death Day, Doctor Who’s season 11 finale ‘Heaven Sent’, I mean, just another Groundhog Day, right? Wrong.
Russian Doll may start with a Groundhog Day premise, but it is so much more than that. I finally watched the first season a year or so after it aired and immediately texted my dad, ‘You need to watch it, like right now. Give it another go, I promise you will not be disappointed.’
Russian Doll follows Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne), a firecracker software engineer with a loud mouth, a dead mother and a troubled childhood, who keeps dying on her thirty-six birthday. As Nadia tries to investigate why this is happening to her, she meets Alan (Charlie Barnett), an uptight, compulsively clean man who also appears to be trapped in a death loop. Alan is reliving his break up with his long-time girlfriend, but finds he quite likes the routine — Wake up, get dressed, have your heart broken, die, repeat.
After meeting Nadia, this routine quickly falls apart and stranger pieces of the puzzle start unveiling as time disintegrates — literally. The pair reach the conclusion that they are connected in more ways than one, and the loops stem from one thing: Nadia’s past with her schizophrenic mother, their Jewish history, and the long-lost fortune of a hundred and fifty Krugerrand gold pieces.
Russian Doll takes us on a psychic, psychedelic, psychological — all the psys really — journey through New York, through childhood and through the traumas that shape us. Featuring a wide cast of eccentric characters, too many obscure pop references, and cracking dialogue from Leslye Headland, Amy Poehler, and Natasha Lyonne, Russian Doll mixes feminist comedy with tragedy perfectly.
However, the core of the story, the undiminishable truth, is that this is an unapologetically Jewish story. Inspired by Lyonne’s heritage, Nadia’s mother’s side of the family is Hungarian-Jewish, displaced during World War II, and the lost Krugerrands are all that is left of their fortune. The ghost of her family’s past sits on Nadia’s shoulders, forever haunting her as she and Alan try to live on, beautifully so, and with all of life’s hardships. As the first season of Russian Doll ends, we are left with one thought: ‘We are all going forward. None of us are going back.’[1]
And of course, Russian Doll proves me wrong again. On April 20th 2022, the second season of the show aired and we dove back into Nadia and Alan’s story. Set four years later, all seems to be going well until time decides to fuck with them again. As Nadia boards the 6 train, she steps out into 1982 in the body of her pregnant mother. In this season, it’s all about going back, with predestination paradoxes, witnesses of history, and the search for meaning, any meaning, as to why everything is so fucked up all the time.
A lot more of the eccentric, funny, and psychologic is in store for Russian Doll’s second season as Alan explores East Germany as his grandmother, and Nadia tries to figure out what the hell happened to those Krugerrands.
Bird from the present here. It is October 4th, 2023, a year and a half since I wrote this review, and seven months on the day since I rewatched Russian Doll. When season 2 aired, I talked about about heritage, and history, and ghosts — which is the same thing as heritage, really. Then I rewatched it, and now I think it’s about witnesses. Nadia spends the entire first season very set on the idea of her mother. In season 2, she gets to witness first hand what it was like to be her mother.
In tragic attempts to break the circle of trauma, she steals herself as a baby, and wants to raise her the way she wished to have been. It doesn't work, of course. Time is a fickle thing that exists only to teach us things about ourselves. There is no going back. Nadia tries and tries to save the Krugerrands, to save the original fortune stolen in a Hungarian pogrom, only to end up back in the same place every time.
Russian Doll teaches us an important lesson about grief, about mothers, and about life. There is no way for me to do justice to this series with my words, I just urge you to watch it. Russian Doll is on Netflix.
[1] Richard Siken, Crush, ‘Snow and Dirty Rain’, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005).