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.

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.

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.