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
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... born in 1883 , was named Sarah but was known to the family as Sister or Sis . Then came Helen , born in 1886 ; Maurice ( also known in the family as Bubba ) in 1888 ; Pearle in 1890 ; Leonard in 1893 ; and Henry in 1896 . Day Apte was ...
... born white women av- eraged 3.56 children , half the birth rate a century earlier . But immigrant and black women continued to have more babies , with foreign - born white women averaging 4.54 children . " There emerged a term for the ...
... born in July of that year . No wonder I didn't write anymore after March . Those four months - how could anyone live ... born in a hospital in 1913 was unusual , but to be born in a maternity hospital was almost unheard of . So Alice's ...
Contents
Hard Times among the flat Dwellers 19111913 | 43 |
Chapter3 At Home at War the Roaring Twentiesand Alice | 73 |
Photographs | 103 |
Copyright | |
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