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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... Sexual Life Charles William Malchow's book , The Sexual Life , was wildly popular in Helen's time . First published in 1905 by the Burton Company of Minneapolis , The Sexual Life went through many print- ings well into the 1920s . The ...
... sexual passion , for in addition to the animal instinct she will , by reason of her experience and observation since early child- hood , have acquired habits of strategy and will exercise tact , with more or less discretion , when her ...
... sexual passion does not become aroused , who do not derive any pleasure or benefit from copulation , and who cannot conceive how the act can be pleasurable for anyone . This division is somewhat arbitrary , as it is possible for a woman ...
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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