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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... character who is forced to choose between some overwhelming duty and some pas- sionate desire . Suppressing these desires is never easy ; they are strong , even overpowering at times . But by choosing duty over desire the character main ...
... characters ; she may have ap- preciated Dickens's plots and social message , for instance , but she would have liked him ... character from a novel - a Maggie Tulliver caught in her own never - ending struggle between duty and desire ...
... character in fiction as I have with Maggie Tulliver . The characters in this book are not mere puppets , but one feels , loves , and grieves with them as living men and women . Mill on the Floss ranks among the first of the books I love ...
Contents
Hard Times among the flat Dwellers 19111913 | 43 |
At Home at War the Roaring Twentiesand Alice | 73 |
Photographs | 103 |
Copyright | |
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