Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish WomanIn 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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 87
... Jews found that they could take root in the Southern landscape . Antebellum Southern Jews , although few in number , had paved the way for their Northern and immigrant coreligionists in the post- war period . There had been some anti ...
... Jews but from the wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who started coming to America in the 1880s . Before long , they had made their way South . In 1870 only 3 percent of Atlanta's Jews were Russian - born ; by 1896 the number ...
... Jews can be ashamed of being Jews has always seemed to me inexplicable , ” she wrote . “ In me burns the ancient pride of race . " On the other hand , Helen , like so many other Southern Jews of her time- like so many American Jews ...
Contents
Hard Times among the flat Dwellers 19111913 | 43 |
Chapter3 At Home at War the Roaring Twentiesand Alice | 73 |
Photographs | 103 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown