Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman

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Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 - Biography & Autobiography - 222 pages
In 1995, NPR editor and producer Marcus D. Rosenbaum met his grandmother-fifty years after her death.

Rosenbaum and his family were attending to the bittersweet business of cleaning out the family home after his father died when, in an old closet, in a ziplock bag, his niece discovered a gateway to the early part of the century and into the life of Helen Jacobus Apte, a Southern Jewish woman living in post-Victorian era Florida and Georgia. The covers of his grandmother's diary were cracked and the pages were beginning to yellow, but there it was: almost forty years of passion, doubt, love, and life, penned in unflinching candor.

Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman is the collection of Helen Apte's own diary and essays by her grandson, Marcus D. Rosenbaum, who edited the volume. This book reflects Apte's unorthodox, complex, and independent spirit during a very conservative time. Her shockingly frank opinions are offered on sex, marriage, children, religion, and her native South.

Crafted in the heartwarming yet heart-wrenching style of Angela's Ashes and A Midwife's Tale, Heart of a Wife allows the reader a unique glimpse at significant events that gripped the world during the first half of the twentieth century: the Great Depression, the World Wars, and the sinking of the Titanic are but a few.

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Contents

Newlywed BlissNewlywed Optimism 19091911
1
Day Apte
7
Race and Responsibility
29
The 1910 Cigar Strike
38
Hard Times among the flat Dwellers 19111913
43
A matter of Life and Deathand Duty
58
In Dixie Land I11 Take My Stand
62
At Home at War the Roaring Twentiesand Alice 19131925
73
Like Hot Eating Ham 19301934
133
My Constant Physical Weakness and Low Vitality
140
Some Questions and Answers
149
A War to Hate a Grandson to Love 19341946
161
Epilog by Marcus D Rosenbaum
181
Selected Biography
183
Excerpts from The Sexual Life
185
Books I Have Read
193

A Hospital Delivery
75
A Life from the Pages of Many Books
97
Photographs
103
Pioneering in Miami 19251929
117
Some Medical Detective Work A Roundtable Discussion
209
The Truth about Grandma
217
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