A Jewish teenage girl’s diary — spanning 1929 – 1934. Not Anne Frank, but Florence Wolfson, an affluent New York City girl. Lily Koppel, a young New York Times writer, found the diary one step short of a dumpster, used journalist’s curiosity and connections to research whether its author, now ninety, was still alive. Successful, Koppel meets her and melds diary excerpts with a narration that elaborates on young Florence’s world.
The Red Leather Diary alternately annoys and intrigues, for the beginning pages by Koppel, written in the passive voice, read like a vocabulary-controlled textbook, while the diarist, a skillful writer, explores her senses with dramatically chosen phrases — ”Finished Dorian Gray…it is the most insidious book I’ve ever read — but fascinating”; in another section she speaks of a person as “mentally fastidious.”
Florence recorded in 1929, soon after she began the diary, “a bitter tragic evening at home with talk of suicide, wills, insurance from supposedly mature parents— it was horrible — terrible.” Precocious Florence — artistic, pretty, ambitious, accomplished, expressing her sexuality matter-of-factly with several girls, taking on boys intermittently, until her marriage at twenty-four to a dentist she had met when she was fifteen.
So, Florence seems to have had it all— affluent parents, “flaming” youth, multi-talents, travel, good looks, a writing career, and, a professional husband for sixty-four years, suburban life, children and grandchildren— all Jewish, and all in good health.
Would you give this book to a fourteen year old? Acknowledgements, foreword, illustrations.
