Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman / Edition 1

by Marcus D. Rosenbaum, Helen Jacobus Apte

Overview

In 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780842027465
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/01/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.48(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.56(d)

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Newlywed Bliss, Newlywed Optimism (1909-1911) Chapter 2 Hard Times among the Flat Dwellers (1911-1913) Chapter 3 At "Home," at War, the Roaring Twenties-and Alice (1913-1925) Chapter 4 Pioneering in Miami (1925-1929) Chapter 5 Like Not Eating Ham (1930-1946) Chapter 6 A War to Hate, a Grandson to Love (1934-1946)

What People are Saying About This

Susan Stamberg

Vibrant and thoughtful. . . Helen Jacobus Apte is the young wife, the mother, the grandmother we never knew. Her diary is a joyful and intimate encounter.

Editorial Reviews

Intriguing. Fascinating. Helen Jacobus Apte provides us with a sensual, moving record of what it wa slike to be a Southern Jewish woman in the first half of the twentieth century.

Alfred Uhry

Apte displays the gifts of a first-rate memoirist: a contemplative, probing mind; an impassioned, often elegant prose; Austenesque powers of social observation; and a self-analytic bent tempered by an awareness of a wider world and wry humor.

The New York Times Book Review

A sizzling portrait of a Southern Jewish woman: self-educated, nurtured on novels, poetry, and the classics, caught in a lifelong struggle between duty and desire. For forty years, Helen Jacobus Apte wrote in he rdiary from every compass point of the heart. Her rich inner life glistens through her grandson's deft and subtle editing.

Dale Rosengarten

...[F]urnishes an insightful record of Southern Jewish bourgeois life in the first half of the 20th century....Apte...movingly articulates....a deeply intelligent woman's search for fulfillment in an age that promised little beyond marriage, motherhood and mah-jongg. -- The New York Times Book Review

Margalit Fox