Lily Koppel – Jewcy

My Book As a Movie

Lily Koppel — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 05:23:57 +0000

"Who’s going to play you in the movie?"

Yesterday, I wrote about The Red Leather Diary movie. "Meryl Streep," Florence answers for who she would like to see as her. "Scarlett Johansson for young Florence or for me," I say.

Of course, I’d love to play myself. From the moment I stepped out of my building at 98 Riverside Drive when I was 22 and encountered Titanic treasure- a dumpster filled with old steamer trunks, among them a crumbling diary, kept my a precocious and sexually adventurous teenager named Florence Wolfson growing up in New York during the Depression, it was like finding a message in a bottle. I climbed up, and into what felt like my own movie. Can you see it?

FADE IN

EXT. 98 RIVERSIDE DRIVE — EARLY MORNING

Old steamer trunks are hauled by TWO BUILDING ENGINEERS to a waiting dumpster from the basement of a prewar building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Camera follows on one mysterious battered chest on its journey from its longtime resting place to the dumpster.

FLASHBACK:

EXT. 98RIVERSIDE DRIVE — NIGHT

Three months earlier. Panorama of New York City from the Lower East Side through Central Park.

Racing in front of the traffic lights, changing block after block to red, the SCREECH of a taxi pulling up at 98 Riverside Drive, written in gold cursive on the maroon awning.

LILY, early 20’s, hiply disheveled, duffle in tow, steps out.

EXT. 98 RIVERSIDE DRIVE — NIGHT

She looks up at the address.

INT. 98 RIVERSIDE DRIVE LOBBY — NIGHT

She walks in and stops,enveloped by the old New York mood enveloping her in the red marble walls and ceiling. She observes it all with an I-love-it-already expression. A DOORMAN looksat her curiously as if she were a vision from the past–or the future.

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

—

The RedLeather Diary paperback hits bookstores on January 20. Come see it for yourself. Please join me for the paperback release party at the 92YTribeca (notyour grandma’s Y), 200 Hudson Street, at 7:30pm on Thursday, January 22.Tickets include a Sloe Gin Fizz, a throwback to the flapper era. Reserve your tickets here. Come in costume. The private eye who helped me track down Florence will be there in his trench coat and houndstooth hat.

The post My Book As a Movie appeared first on Jewcy.

The Movie in My Mind

Lily Koppel — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 02:57:53 +0000

"Who’s going to play you in the movie?" From hidden in a teenage diary with a key, 90-year-old Florence was revealed in a book. I have traveled to 20 cities on The Red Leather Diary tour, and with the paperback coming out next week on January 20, we will log more. Florence and I often appear together.

At the end of each reading, we were inevitably asked that question.

"Meryl Streep," answered a glamorous Florence, staring off for a moment in her violet tinted black-framed Gucci glasses.

"Scarlett Johansson for young Florence or for me," I said. "What do you think? I’d love to hear your suggestions."

From the moment I stepped out of my building at 98 Riverside Drive when I was 22 and encountered Titanic treasure – a dumpster filled with old steamer trunks plastered with vintage travel stickers, just a polishing away from their descendents at Louis Vuitton, it was like finding a message in a bottle.

Unhesitatingly, I climbed up, and into what felt like my own movie.

When I decided to become awriter, I made a pact with myself. If I want to write, I must become an interesting person and take chances.

At Elaine’s, the famous Upper East Side restaurant, which just celebrated its 45th anniversary, a group of New York Times editors took me out to dinner to celebrate The Red Leather Diary‘s publication. After one too many whiskeys, I overheard my boyfriend, Tom, a writer, talking to a radio personality. "The Red Leather Diary is The Ben-Hur of our generation." "Where did you get that?" I laughed, shaking my head as our cab sped us through Manhattan towards home.

When I found the diary, I was immediately transfixed by the writings of the young woman, who breathlessly chronicled her teenage years during the 1930s. Passionate, cosmopolitan, cultured, risk-taking, tempted equally by both men and women, Florence seemed to leap from the page – and to elicit connections to my own life as a 20-something single woman in New York.

Maybe Claire Danes, Julia Stiles…

Florence’s life was rich in theater and art, salons, an obsession with a famous avant-garde actress, Eva Le Gallienne, and lovers, writers and poets, including an Italian count Florence met when she sailed to Europe in 1936. Filippo Canaletti Gaudenti da Sirola – I love rolling all of his names off my tongue. Filippo, a poet and pilot, composed love verses to Florence, which he published in his book, Il poeta e l’amore.

"He was gorgeous, a movie star," Florence sighed.

Florence thanked me for getting her out of "the ghetto of old age," with her daughters and granddaughters looking on. Florence helped finish my sentences as I inscribed, "Once upon a time…"

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

——

Take a Special Sneak Peak at The Red Leather Diary paperback here.

The post The Movie in My Mind appeared first on Jewcy.

How I Slipped into a Depression-Era Young Woman’s World

Lily Koppel — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:38:15 +0000

Paging through the original red leather diary for the first time gave me goosebumps. Little flakes of red leather from its worn cover sprinkled onto my white bedspread. Every page and entry was magical. I couldn’t help but think, how did it find its way to me, and why?

Florence’s life was one of theater and art, many lovers, writers and poets, including the Italian count Florence fell for while in Rome when she sailed to Europe in 1936. Names floated on the pages through time: Eva Le Gallienne… George… Nat… Manny… Pearl… Evelyn…

That first night with the diary when I was 22, in 2003, I slipped under the covers and continued to read. I followed Florence’s adventures into the night. My lavender-painted room, which I was renting in the Upper West Side apartment of an eccentric older woman, filled with an orange glow from the streetlamp outside my window. Time seemed to do a backbend, like in yoga.

I felt as if we were one, this girl from the’30s and I. Florence wrote on July 3, 1932: Five hours of tennis and glorious happiness–All I want — is someone to love — I feel incomplete.

I got out of bed to examine the other items I had found in the steamer trunks in the dumpster alongside the diary, the rose beaded flapper dress, which hung from its wooden trunk hanger like a pale pink ghost. I wrapped myself in the musty glamour of the tangerine bouclé coat with the label sewn into its silk lining, the color of the pearly inside of a shell: "Bergdorf Goodman on the Plaza." I secured its elegant Bakelite button.

I slipped into the flapper dress and quietly danced around my room until beads from its frail fringe started hailing down onto wooden floorboards. I eyed the black satin bathing costume for an hourglass figure. Its straps crisscrossed my back like X-marks-the-spot.

As I stared into my full-length closet mirror, the old kind in two separating layers dotted with black spots like a jumpy old film reel, I couldn’t help but wonder: Who was this young woman? Who was Florence Wolfson? Who was I? As I walked around New York, Florence’s diary became my guide. Trying on a dress at Bergdorf’s, I caught myself searching my reflection, waiting for Florence to join me. Considering a lipstick at Barney’s, I noticed the Nars lipstick, "Flora" between "Orgasm" and "Pillow Talk."

I stopped at La Perla to pass the time before meeting a friend, an actress, and thought of Florence amid lace as light as sea foam, embroideries made by fairy hands. I flipped through color swatches and lost myself in its underworld. The Roaring Twenties. Jazz. The Charleston. Coco Chanel. Garter belts. The’30s evoked Marlene Dietrich. The seducing Blue Angel in corset, stockings and top hat. Just what the dismal times needed.

Florence’s words floated down through the city’s canyons, and into my mind. Only a few favorite places survived from her New York. One was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I often sought rest in the Chinese Garden Court. From the rooftop sculpture garden, I stared at the dreamlike citadel of Manhattan’s rooftops. New York is the place of stories, allegory, and metaphor. Like Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy on the road to Oz, Florence was determined to make her way. I discovered the diary, a real-life time machine, which transported me back into Florence’s world. Florence once wrote, on the beach, away from her city, Oh, for dear old New York! I needed Florence.

Fearlessly and authentically, Florence Wolfson filled the diary’s pages, recording her life’s adventures over five years, from 1929 to 1934 from 14 to until she turned 19. I learned from a newspaper scrap, which fell out of the diary’s pages that Florence had lived on the Upper East Side.

Three years later, I found Florence, miraculously, after receiving a chance call from a private eye. Charles Eric Gordon was like a pulp 1930s character who entered my life wearing a trench coat, pulling a magnifying glass out of his inside lapel. His license plate read "Sleuth3."

Florence, I learned when I finally met her at 90 and reunited her with her red leather diary, was one of a generation of Depression-stamped young men and women who longed to cultivate a creative life. As a 19-year-old Columbia graduate student, Florence hosted a literary salon in her parents’ apartment. Among her friends were the young poets, Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman.

Scalloped-edged black and white photographs recreated the half-forgotten world of the sophisticated young Manhattanite who loved "making a sensation" outfitted in clothes designed by her mother, a couture dressmaker with a shop on Madison Avenue, who had come to America alone as a teenager and worked her way up to being a respected business owner, a rare accomplishment in those days.

After Florence married, she drifted from her art and admitted she had, later in life, "a country club mentality." As she fingered the pages of the red leather-bound book crumbling in her hands, she reflected on the young woman brought to life so vividly in its pages.

The diary proved how buttoned up our version of the past tends to be. Long before blue jeans entered the scene, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Woodstock–love was in the air. A sexual revolution was taking place in Florence’s 1930s world. If Florence had been born fifty years later, she would have fit right in.

As open as Florence was in her diary, she was with me. That’s Florence, a timeless teenager. As she headed north from her home in Pompano Beach to embark on the book tour, her email to me read:

We’re leaving soon–am trying to be calm–but who expected all this at my age? Lv

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The Red Leather Diary paperback hits bookstores on January 20. Please join me for the paperback release party at the 92YTribeca (not your grandma’s Y), 200 Hudson Street, at 7:30pm on Thursday, January 22. Tickets include a Sloe Gin Fizz, a throwback to the flapper era. Reserve your tickets here. Come in costume. The private eye who helped me track down Florence will be there in his trench coat and houndstooth hat.

The post How I Slipped into a Depression-Era Young Woman’s World appeared first on Jewcy.

Discovering My Bubbe: When Grandma Was a “Wild Young Thing”

Lily Koppel — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:04:28 +0000

Yesterday I posted about how when I left my apartment one morning and encountered a dumpster full of old steamer trunks, I climbed in and into what felt like my own movie, an Upper West Side version of Titanic, starring me and a femme fatale from the 1930s. Among the artifacts, I recovered a red-leather diary, kept by a young woman named Florence Wolfson from 1929 to 1934, discarded after years of languishing in my building’s storage unit. Its pages revealed the adventures of an intensely creative young Jewish woman growing up in Depression Era Manhattan. At 90, I reunited Florence, who I tracked down with the help of a film noir private investigator, with her diary, which became a virtual fountain of youth, filled with entries, like this one from when she was 15: "Stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven—I feel like a ripe apricot—I’m dizzy with the exotic." As a headstrong teenager, she loved Baudelaire, Central Park, and men and women with equal abandon. Although written at a time when sex was a subject discussed discreetly, the diary was studded with intimate details. April 11, 1932: "Slept with Pearl tonight—it was beautiful. There is nothing so gratifying as physical intimacy with one you like." The diary was a time machine transporting me back to Florence’s 1930s New York, inspiring me, now 27, to write my first book, The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal. What I didn’t know was that it would provide insights into my own life, connecting me to my Jewish heritage, providing a portal into my history, in particular, the life of my grandmother, Miriam Zelikow, whom I never met. Miriam was born on January 21, 1917, two years after Florence, who was born in 1915. The most popular girls’ names that year included Florence and my name, Lillian (my Hebrew name is Miriam). But Miriam died before I was born, from a brain tumor when my father was 20. On Sundays, I would visit Florence at her home in Westport, where we would eat mini bagels and lox and travel back in time. I showed Florence my grandmother’s college ring on my finger set with its ruby glass. When I was a little girl, my Dad also gave me Miriam’s gold heart-shaped locket, which his father bought on a vacation in Miami Beach for his sons to give her on Mother’s Day. It opens to the inscription, "To Mom—1956." Speaking to Florence, I felt closer to Miriam. The more I learned about Florence, I felt parallel histories. Florence attended Hunter College, as did Miriam, entering the year after Florence in 1931. Florence described to me how she strode into class in fawn-colored jodpurs after a jaunt on horseback through Central Park, which she wore to school because she knew how dashing she looked. A writer and painter, Florence was ahead of her time, had love affairs with men and women, including a classmate of hers named Pearl. Miriam only attended classes at Hunter for a year before falling sick, mysteriously. She was taken out of school and when she returned to college, it was to St. John’s University where she was graduated in 1939 at the top of her class. She went on to teach French Literature there and at her other alma mater, New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn. Florence led a privileged life on the Upper East Side. Hers was a life of theater, art, writers, and poets, including the Italian count with whom she had a love affair when she sailed to Europe in 1936. As a 19-year-old graduate student at Columbia, Florence hosted a literary salon in her parents’ apartment, which included the young poets Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman. Although Miriam lived a more sheltered life in Brooklyn, there are many similarities. Both her and Florence’s parents were Russian immigrants from long lines of prominent rabbis and all had arrived at Ellis Island in 1906. The Wolfsons and the Zelikows were both in the garment business. Florence’s mother was a sought after dressmaker with a shop, Rabecca Wolfson Gowns, on fashionable Madison Avenue. Miriam’s father, my great grandfather, Morris, was a manufacturer, producing coats for Macy’s, then Saks, then Bergdorf Goodman (among the treasures I found in the trunks with the diary was a tangerine bouclé Bergdorf’s coat with a single Bakelite button, which, after a trip to the dry cleaner, I now wear.) During WWII, Morris made coats for the army. He met his wife, Ida, who he called Chasi—the diminutive for “life”—a seamstress in his garment district factory. Florence’s mother came to New York as an immigrant girl, leaving behind her identical twin in the old country, who was later killed in a pogrom. Rebecca Wolfson began her new life as a seamstress on the Lower East Side. I imagined brunette Miriam and blonde Florence, two fearlessly intelligent Jewish women, the daughters of immigrants, their fur-collared coats brushing past each other in Hunter’s hall. Florence and I were both artists and longed to carve out our own paths. Now, I excavated my own. At my parents’ home in Chicago, in a trunk, I found Miriam’s brown leather junior high school autograph album, once golden, filled with intimate messages. On the cover, there were a line of books with two goblets with candles burning bright. On the back, wings spread out from the books in a protective gesture. Beyond the Pledge of Allegiance in the front with the image of the flag, a poem: "Your words must not be not only clever, but fit to adorn this book forever." Miriam’s album spoke to Florence’s crumbling red diary (there were even two inscriptions from girls named Florence). There was a picture of Pershing Junior High, an austere-looking brick building, followed by a picture of General Pershing in his WWI uniform and hat. Miriam filled in her graduation program by hand, nine events, including the orchestra playing a song called, "Melody of Years." In a photo pressed between its pages, Miriam looked like a debutante in pretty chiffon dress, dated July 1932. In it, I can make out an Adirondack chair in the background, which is very leafy. Perhaps she was in the Catskills for the summer and changed into the dress to have her portrait taken in the garden. She listed her teachers names from kindergarten through eighth grade, which included Nabokovian sounding names: Ms. Wand in kindergarten, Ms. Lavender in first grade, Ms. Dickinson in sixth, all were Irish or Jewish. On a page called "My Favorite," Miriam included under each heading: "Game": tennis; "Chum": Florence Winters; "High School": New Utrecht: "Profession": teacher. She concluded, under "Motto," written in neat, small script: "What I am to be, I am now becoming." That’s how I felt. Who she was, I was now learning about and becoming, in part, myself. On January 2, 1932, she wrote: "My Album’s Open! Come and See! What! Won’t you waste a line on me! Write but a thought, a word or two, that memory may revert to you." The next page is a photo of her father all dressed in white, smoking a cigar. Next to it, he wrote, "Dear Miriam, I wish you lots of luck to suksess." He writes it in Hebrew as well and signs it, "Dad." Miriam treasured her little book and showed it years later to her sons, my father and his brother, Alan, who also added to it. "Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Kiss me Kid, I’m a Kosher Jew. Lots of Luck, Alan K." My dad wrote, signing his name in reverse: "Dated til the film strips. To Miriam, Lots of Luck. Leppok Trebor or your son Robert." Many of the pages have, like this one, in all four corners: "4, Get, Me, Not." Florence has become a celebrity through my discovery of her teenage diary and we have been doing TV appearances, including The Today Show. "Do you keep a diary today?" a female anchor in a bright-pink suit asked Florence. "No." At 92, Florence said she’s happy just breathing and feeling more alive than she has in years. "Should people keep diaries?" asked the anchor. "Absolutely, because it’s a wonderful way to get a perspective on yourself," said Florence, looking at me, holding my hand. "When you read it, you suddenly see yourself from the outside." The Red Leather Diary was a gift to Florence on her 14th birthday in 1929. It was a gift to me when I found it at 22, searching for love and meaning in my life. It was a gift, again, to Florence at 90. It is a gift to everyone who connects with its message of recognizing the significance of all of our lives. As open as Florence was in her diary, she was in person at 90. She matter-of-factly discussed her insecurities, early love affairs, and artistic ambition. I felt and cherished her emotional generosity. Hers is a particular kind of openness born of intellectual and philosophical questioning, self-reflection, sarcasm, irony, and humor. My father always said I would have loved his mother, my grandmother Miriam for all these reasons. Florence’s diary transported me to a distant world, a world of my own, which until now had been locked.

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

—

Please join Lily for The Red Leather Diary Paperback Release Party at the 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, at 7:30pm on Thursday, January 22. Tickets include a Sloe Gin Fizz, a throwback to the flapper era. Reserve your tickets here.

Email me at lily@redleatherdiary.com

To invite me for to your book group’s discussion, email bookclub@redleatherdiary.com

Reading Group Guide Available Here

Check out The Red Leather Diary Trailer

The post Discovering My Bubbe: When Grandma Was a “Wild Young Thing” appeared first on Jewcy.

Secrets of a Depression-Era Diary

Lily Koppel — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 04:34:36 +0000

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, is guest blogging this week as one of Jewcy‘s Lit Klatsch bloggers. Lily’s book was inspired by her discovery of 90-year-old Florence Wolfson Howitt’s diary in a Manhattan dumpster.

When I first opened the red leather diary, I had no idea of the world that was about to unfold before me and change the course of my life and that of 90-year-old Florence Wolfson Howitt. When I left my apartment one morning in 2003 and encountered a Dumpster full of old steamer trunks, among other artifacts, I recovered the diary, discarded after years of languishing in my building’s storage unit. Its pages revealed the adventures of a young woman growing up in Manhattan in the 1930s.

Back in my room, holding my breath, I released the brass latch. Despite the rusted keyhole, the diary was unlocked. Little pieces of red leather sprinkled onto my white comforter. From 1929 to 1934, not a single day’s entry had been skipped. The journal painted a vivid picture of 1930s New York — horseback riding in Central Park, summer excursions to the Catskills and an obsession with a famous avant-garde actress, Eva Le Gallienne. Its nearly 2,000 entries, written in faded black ink, captured the passions and ambitious of an intensely creative young Jewish woman. Brief, breathless dispatches filled every page of the five-year chronicle, unfurling into a Manhattan fairy tale.

“Mile Stones Five Year Diary” was written in gold letters across the book’s worn cover. Inside, a blue vine grew around the frontispiece, stamped with a zodiac wheel: “This book belongs to… Florence Wolfson.” The diary seemed to respond to being back in warm hands, its pages becoming unstuck and fanning out. I flipped through the entries, dense with girlish cursive. I could tell it the journal had been cherished. I located the date that Florence began writing: August 11, 1929, the day she received the diary as a gift for her 14th birthday.

As I slipped under the covers, trying to image what Florence might have looked like, a brittle newspaper clipping fell out from between two stuck pages. It was from the Forward, written in Yiddish and English: “Florence Wolfson, of 1391 Madison Ave., who was graduated from Wadleigh H.S. at 15, is the recipient of a State Scholarship.”

Florence’s picture was printed on the clipping. Except for her marcelled blond hair, she appeared completely contemporary, as if she were a young woman of today. Her eyes were sensual and intelligent. I could see myself in her face; we were both writers and painters. Florence seemed so alive, intensely internal and fully engaged with the world around her.

I couldn’t help but read her entries as if they were personal letters to me. Florence and I shared so many of the same longings for love, and the desire to make our own way. As I read her diary, I was drawn into Florence’s day-to-day existence, trips to the theater and escapes to the Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1929. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, free and almost deserted during the week, was a temple that she wandered in, solitary and content, for hours without seeing a soul.

The diary was a portal into this lost world. I felt as if we were one, this young woman from the ’30s and I. My lavender bedroom filled with an orange glow from the streetlamp outside my second-story windows.

Compelled by the hopes and heartaches and uncanny similarities I shared with her, I set out to find Florence, my only clue her name and address on the Forward clipping. Staring out of the sepia newsprint, her luminous eyes would not let me go. Florence seemed to be saying, “Find me, find me.”

Three years later, I received a chance phone call from a private investigator I’d hired. Searching the city’s birth records, he discovered one Florence Wolfson, born in New York City on August 11, 1915, to a pair of Jewish immigrants from Russia, a doctor and his wife. He led me to Florence Howitt, a 90-year-old woman living with her husband of 67 years, with homes in Westport, Conn., and Pompano Beach, Fla.

One Sunday afternoon in April 2006, eagerly and a bit nervously, I dialed Florence’s Florida number on my cell. After two rings, a refined voice with the command of a stage actress answered. “Hello?” “Florence?”

I met Florence for the first time in May 2006 in Westport, where she lived with her 95-year-old husband, Nathan Howitt, a retired oral surgeon who was one of many admirers from her youth.

Florence hugged me. She was an ageless phenom, full of spunk. During weekly Sunday visits over bagels and lox, we got to know each other. Reunited with her diary, Florence journeyed back to the girl she had been, rediscovering a lost self that had burned with creative fervor.

Florence was one of a generation of Depression-stamped young men and women who longed to cultivate a creative life. As a 19-year-old Columbia graduate student, she hosted a literary salon in her parents’ apartment. Her friends, the young poets Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman, were members.

During our talks, Florence showed me old photographs. Scalloped-edged black-and-white images re-created the half-forgotten world of the sophisticated young Manhattanite who grew up on the Upper East Side. In the snapshots, Florence is outfitted in clothes designed by her mother, a couture dressmaker with a shop on Madison Avenue. Her mother had come to America alone as a teenager and worked her way up to being a respected business owner, a rare accomplishment in those days.

Stern family portraits projected the intellectual strength and fearlessness of the Wolfsons. Both of Florence’s parents came from families of prominent rabbis and went to work the day they arrived in this country.

After Florence married, she drifted from her art and admitted that later in life she took on “a country club mentality.” As she fingered the pages of the leather-bound book crumbling in her hands, she reflected on the young woman brought to life so vividly in its pages.

Last April, Florence’s husband died. I learned from her diary that they had met when she was 13 at Spring Lake, his parents’ Catskills hotel. I flew down to Florida to be with her. “Lily and her new grandmother,” Florence said, as we took a photo. “You’ve brought back my life.”

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

—

Lily Koppel writes for The New York Times and other publications. She is the author of “The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal” (HarperCollins), which comes out in paperback this month.

Email me at lily@redleatherdiary.com

To invite me for to your book group’s discussion, email bookclub@redleatherdiary.com

Reading Group Guide Available Here

Check out The Red Leather Diary Trailer

The post Secrets of a Depression-Era Diary appeared first on Jewcy.