Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman (review)

Figure 1.

Ticket buyers at the Mayland Fair. Spruce Pine, North Carolina, ca. 1934. Photo by Bayard Wootten. (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill).

Although written for an audience of one, personal diaries are a literary genre of enduring fascination. Witness the popularity of the adolescent diary of Anne Frank (1942), the decoded diaries of Samuel Pepys (1606–1669), and the feminist diaries of Anaïs Nin (1931–1974 ). A diary’s candor is generally unquestioned. Its partiality intrigues. Its secretive intent awakens voyeuristic curiosity. Composed without plot, rigid form, or revisions, a diary often surprises with its compelling pace, historic detail, and insights into past and present. Its theme of self in relation to society often resounds with relevancy regardless of era.

Helen Jacobus Apte (1886–1946), begins her diary as a blissful, 22-year-old bride. The year is 1909. Helen, an Atlanta woman raised in the Victorian age and maturing in modern times, has had little formal schooling. Self-educated, she often consumes a book a day and quotes from classical and popular sources as she confides her thoughts to paper. As the spouse of a white-collar worker who manages a Tampa cigar factory and later operates a Miami canning enterprise, Helen experiences the upheaval of labor-management conflicts, a “genteel poverty” when bankruptcy nears, and the optimism washed across America by Franklin Roosevelt’s election.

On a more personal level, Helen modestly describes her sexual libido. She writes, “A woman is ashamed to show passion, . . . afraid she will fall in her husband’s estimation, or in her own. . . . I find it hard to give in and act as I feel.” She hints at flirtations with new and old beaus and discusses The Sexual Life by Dr. Charles Malchow, a proctologist who was the Kinsey of his day. She yearns for motherhood, alluding to “my little unborn dream children.” Sadly, her first pregnancy ends in miscarriage. Her second results in an only child, a daughter who disappoints for being practical rather than creative like her mother. Helen had expected to live through her children, an idealized notion she realizes through her first grandchild.

Helen’s ruminations and disappointments presage the feminist philosophies that flower in Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) half a century later. Her unfulfilled dream is to become a professional writer. Indeed, her diary demonstrates the fluent pen and colorful language requisite to achieve that goal. Helen, however, puts herself down as “untrained,” asks “What am I fitted for?” and confesses that she is “ashamed to see my life slipping away by doing nothing.” When business reversals force Helen to move into her in-laws’ home, she has scant time for her diary and yearns for solitude and space, the room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf (1929) would turn into feminist cliché. Frail health, which forced Helen to drop out of school at age fourteen, follows her throughout adulthood, and descriptions of physical ailments filter the diary. Unspoken, but just as recurrent, is evidence of life-long depression—“Blues,” she calls it. “Always there is that vague unrest, that faint nostalgia—for what? I don’t even know.”

Helen’s diary was discovered in 1995 by her grandson, Marcus Rosenbaum, a Washington, D.C., journalist who has lovingly edited and annotated the journal of the grandmother who died before his birth. In nine essays interlacing the text, Rosenbaum explains references to family and current events such as the 1910 cigar strike and the boxing defeat of the Great White Hope. He adds social context with enlightening research on infant and maternal mortality, as well as commentary about “Race and Responsibility” and being “Jewish in the South.” Appendices include Helen’s one published magazine article; a partial list of books she read and...