The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel

First line: “Once upon a time the diary had a tiny key.”

Have you ever kept a diary? What would you do if you stumbled upon someone else’s diary, someone else’s life? Would you read it? (Who wouldn’t?) Would you be the least bit curious to find out what happened to that person? If they fulfilled the dreams they had spilled with ink on those pages? You would if you were a journalist and most certainly if you were Lily Koppel, a journalist at the New York Times, who came upon the diary in the trunks of the apartment where she lives. The landlords were trashing them, and besides some other great vintage finds from the early 20th century, the red leather diary sat within the keepsake ruins. A doorman had found it and kept it in his locker, and asked Koppel if she wanted it. And so the story of the past comes smack into the present. 

I kept a diary just like the one young Florence kept. Five years on each page, with nary an inch to its daily purpose, to keep your “milestones” of that particular day. Only mine, in sixth grade in a very small town in Oklahoma, captured things like, “went to Pizza Hut with the family. Ate four slices of pepperoni pizza. Yum!” (I know, not exactly the hint of a future author there.) But for Florence Wolfson, her milestones were anything but boring. A part of the charm of the diary itself is the time, place and class of its young writer. Florence got the diary for her 14th birthday. She was the daughter of a doctor and a couture dress designer in New York. The diary’s entries span 1929 to 1934. 

Even more miraculously, with the help of a detective, Lily found Florence, still alive, still spunky, and ninety years old! If Florence weren’t still alive, The Red Leather Diary would be no more than an interesting article in the Times. What makes it a great memoir is because Lily was able to mine the magnificent mind of Florence Wolfson to expound those short entries into the makings of a wonderful picture in time. Florence was unique, yes. She was an artist, through and through. Passionate, curious and determined, Florence’s coming of age story in New York before, during, and after the Stock Market crash, is full of wild emotion and dreams for a richer life, though not in her mother’s sense of the word richer. 

True, Koppel’s exposition and beautiful prose bring Florence’s past to life, but the diary entries themselves are intriguing in their own right. And how some of them ring true eighty years later speaks to the universal string that binds us all together. 

“Tonight Bernard told me he loved me better than any other girl and I said the same. It sounded like what we read in books.” 

And this:

“A date & bored & almost revolted: Something about silly, stuffy unimaginative men makes me sick and angry.”

A great deal of Florence’s entries have to do with the arts – writing, painting and plays; her own and the smorgasbord offered on the New York scene. With Koppel’s keen skill at adding flesh to the story, we get Florence’s struggles with her parents, her own sexuality, her education and frustrations about life and a future different than the one her parents envision for her. (To marry rich, what else is there?) 

Highly recommended for transporting back to a time and a place that was harder in some ways and simpler in others to our hectic lives today. Young Florence became real to me, just as all great characters in a novel should, and since this is a memoir (and not made up!), I feel honored that Florence and Koppel gave us a glimpse of a time gone by and a girl on the brink of greatness. 

For: Anyone who loves historical novels, the 1920s, memoirs, writing and the arts, and coming of age stories. – Malena Lott

Order it at Amazon.