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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... course , I'm glad we will move to a city . It doesn't matter much where I live , but I'm glad I don't have to spend the rest of my life in Tallahassee . Still , there were beautiful days passed here - long , busy days , which I hadn't ...
... course , Day could get a lucrative position today . There is demand for men like him . But he has to stick to his ... course , that the men for whom he had worked hard and faithfully for fifteen years would help him out , but it seems we ...
... course it made all the worse the bitter end , when I was suddenly taken ill - and it was all over ! I had an attack of appendicitis at the same time and high fever , and of course suffered very much , but didn't realize I was threatened ...
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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