Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman [Paperback]

Marcus D. Rosenbaum (Author), Helen Jacobus Apte (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0842027467 | ISBN-13: 978-0842027465 | Edition: First edition.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers lived in a world we can scarcely imagine, and for most of us, their interior lives remain a mystery. What did they think about love, family, marriage, the society around them? What were their dreams, fears, and ambitions? In other words, were these women anything like us? Marcus D. Rosenbaum was given the rare opportunity to answer these questions. Cleaning out a closet after his father's death, Rosenbaum found a diary that had belonged to his grandmother, dead more than 50 years before. The yellowed pages within chronicled almost 40 years of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of one Southern Jewish woman--in some ways a quite ordinary wife and mother, and in other ways not ordinary at all. Born in Georgia of a Jewish family, Helen Jacobus married Day Apte in 1909 and began keeping a diary that would last until her death in 1946. With unusual intelligence and candor, she explored their life together through two world wars and the Great Depression, including her most intimate thoughts about children, sex, religion, the South--even her occasional attractions to other men. Raised to embrace Victorian values just as they were passing away in the outside world, Apte sometimes chafed against the restrictions imposed upon her by her times. Part of the great pleasure of reading these diary entries is seeing how her keen mind made the most of the limited sphere it was allotted. A former journalist for National Public Radio, Rosenbaum has done a skillful job editing this volume, adding essays that put Apte's life into social and historical context. The result is a fitting tribute to an ordinary woman of extraordinary strength and insight. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

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 )

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 )

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 )

Product Details

• Paperback: 222 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; First edition. edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0842027467
• ISBN-13: 978-0842027465
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,682,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an intimate view of a pre-feminist world, July 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman (Paperback)

Helen Jacobus Apte was a remarkable woman. Readers gain an intimate view of a pre-feminist world by reading her very private diary. A Southern Jewess who valued her Southern and Jewish origins equally, Apte lived a comfortable life and served as an articulate witness to vital events in early 20th Century American life. Apte's writing is beautiful and she makes even the most mundane subjects poignant with the quality of her insights and prose. A clear talent,she apparently failed to recognize her ability or chose - for one reason or another - to share it only with her diary. Fortunately for us, her grandson, who discovered the diary long after Apte's death, brought it to publication complete with a series of highly-informative supportive essays which help readers appreciate the times in which his grandmother lived. Apte was a true romantic and may have been one of the last Victorians. In many ways her values are so remote from ours today, that it's a stretch to appreciate her; which makes reading Heart of a Wife a satisfying exploration into real-life history.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This book offers great insight about Jewish Women of the Sou, August 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman (Hardcover)

Heart of a Wife: The diary of a Southern Jewish Woman opened up a window to a world that was completely foreign to me despite a common European Jewish heritage. Helen Jacobus Apte was born in 1886 Georgia and was first generation American but did not have any of the immigrant characteristics and values that I would have expected. She derived her set of values and standards from the dominant Victorian culture rather than from Jewish Tradition, yet she did have an important place in her heart for Judaism.

She spoke of her intention as a new bride to light shabbat candles every week and we know that she was active in her temple and in Jewish Charities, but it is unclear if she did observe Jewish Rituals throughout her life. There is no mention of a seder and Rosh Hashana was referred to as "The New Year" with little elaboration. Marcus D Rosenberg, her grandson,acknowleges that " Readers may find it curious that so little in it is identifiably "Jewish". In some ways of course, everything in it is Jewish. Judaism was behind Helen's clearly liberal social conscience. Her Religion not only guided her views of life and death but also shaped her views of duty and responsibility."

Helen's parents immigrated to the United States from Germany and I am amazed that her connections to her European past could have been so cleanly severed. I could not imagine a woman of her intelligence and supposed social consciousness would not be more aware of the the plight of European Jewry during the thirties and forties and not feel some connection to it. (If she did, she never mentioned it.) Rosenberg explains in his essay that Helen identified as a Southern American who happened to be Jewish" and that was common in that time and Place.

Marcus Rosenberg does a wonderful job of setting the historical context and establishing identities of family members. His essays offer great insight into the times and the events which influence her. I do think he has a more romantic image of his grandmother than she deserves. I was very disappointed by Helen Jacobus Apte. I thought that she had great talent and potential but was too self absorbed to have any positive effect on those around her, and certainly not on the world.

Was Helen Apte truly a typical Southern Jewish Woman? I hope that she was not. She was the stereo-typical Southern Belle, spoiled , self-centered, with a constant case of the "vapors". Although she alludes to world events, none of them seemed to touch her. Only "The 1910 Cigar Strike," which affected her directly and financially, seemed to really matter. She was the center of her world, and she seemed to use her ill health to her best advantage.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, But..., August 28, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Belmont, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman (Hardcover)

I enjoy reading diaries, especially from the past, and gaining more insight into people's thoughts and feelings. While I didn't dislike Helen Jacobus Apte as much as some other reviewers did, I did think that her diary was a trifle boring. I found myself skimming through parts of it, although it did give a fairly good picture of Southern life in that time period. Overall, I'd say this book was a mild disappointment.