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The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life through the Pages of a Lost Journal
Lily Koppel
#UC2002
Hardcover, 321 pages; 2008
$23.95
 Members' Price: $20.36
In 2003, Lily Koppel, a twenty-two-year-old journalist for the New York Times, came across a stack of old trunks (unclaimed storage from many decades back) being discarded outside her building on the Upper West Side. Koppel rescued several items: a pale pink flapper dress, a typewriter… and a red leather diary. Written faithfully by a girl named Florence Wolfson, the diary had entries for every single day from Florence's fourteenth birthday—in 1929—to her nineteenth. The pages were filled with rhapsodic reflections about books, art, and music; spirited accounts of an active social life; intimate details about romances (with both men and women); and the hopes and ambitions, triumphs and disappointments of everyday life. Depression-era New York glimmered into focus, through the eyes of an extraordinary young woman. Amazingly, Koppel was able to track down the diary's author and return it to her (making Florence, in her words, "one of the most excited old women in the world.") In The Red Leather Diary, Koppel re-creates the early life of Florence Wolfson—interspersing actual excerpts from her diary with fleshed-out (non-fictionalized) stories gleaned from interviewing the now-nonagenarian diarist. It's heady stuff!
(CH)
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