Charlotte's Diary

My grandmother's finely tooled leather diary has long since lost its key. Now, anyone can open the small brass lock that sits on its cover making its contents accessible to all. Its inside pages measure only 3 by 6 ½ inches but their intricate binding makes the book seem slightly larger. A delicate gold braid of tulips frame the face of Charlotte's diary. Unlike its worn leather corners, this gilded design doesn’t show its age. The faded green and red panels painted on top of the brown leather cover offer a sense of something missing but not quite forgotten.

A very important piece of information about Charlotte's life can be found on the very first page of this diary. Here, the little book is inscribed with a flowing hand, "To Charlotte from Jennie". Over the years I've learned that Jennie Jonas was a very close friend of my grandmother. That this book survives is a tribute to the strength of Charlotte and Jennie's friendship. It is one of the few possessions of my grandmother's which still exists.

When Charlotte died in May of 1928, she was 47 years old. She surely had other diaries, address and appointment books. These, I imagine, were filled to the brim with her fine handwriting, smudges and erasures. Unlike this precious book, they were used by my grandmother on a daily basis; and, in the years after her death, they were discarded. This exquisite five year diary was the only one saved by her husband and her sons. Perhaps, they knew that it was given to her by a dear friend. Perhaps, the beauty of its cover rescued it. Perhaps, the comfort which can still be found holding it in one’s hand insured its survival.

Recently, Charlotte’s diary was sent to me at in Ann Arbor by my cousin Molly. It had been saved for almost eighty years by her youngest son, Dick. Molly is graciously sharing it with me so that it can be copied to my website. Neither Molly nor I knew our grandmother. She died in 1928, long before any of her grandchildren were born. Insured and in UPS packaging, Charlotte’s diary arrived  just days before I was to leave for Chicago to help my daughter prepare for the birth of her second child. As I readied myself for the trip, the arrival of my own grandmother’s diary seemed quite appropriate.

By Spring of 1925, Charlotte and Jennie had known each other for almost twenty years. Jennie's husband Nathan Jonas and Charlotte's husband Fred worked closely together on several business adventures. Nathan was a banker and my grandfather was a businessman. Together, they also shared a love of golf and in April of 1925, they established together Lakeville Golf Course in Fresh Meadows, Long Island.  From Nathan's autobiography, I first learned that the couples often vacationed together and that indeed Charlotte and Jennie were "intimate friends".

I believe that it was in the spring of 1925 that Jennie gave this diary to her friend. The dated first entry is Friday, April 24, 1925. Newspaper reports of the time announced the grand opening of Lakeville Golf Course just shortly after that date. While their husbands shared the celebrity of the Golf Course they established together, Charlotte and Jennie might have exchanged gifts as tokens of their shared friendship.

The entries in this diary are sparse. Over the five years time span of Charlotte’s diary only 70 of a possible 1,825 days have entries.  The entries begin right at the time of the opening of the Lakeville Golf Course, Spring 1925. Some twelve days in April and May of 1925 record specific activities. There are more short entries in late 1927. The proximity of these entries to Charlotte’s death only months later makes them much more important than their brevity implies. Other calendar days bear witness to the births, weddings, and deaths of friends and family members. In contrast the address pages are full. Many names I don’t recognize.

Before I began my trip to Chicago, I carefully copied by hand into my journal all of the diary’s calendar entries. I wanted to take them with me - in a certain way- to Chicago. The actual book was put away until there would be more time to copy it into my website.

In Chicago, happily active with grandmotherly duties, the diary’s presence added to my own presence in my grandchildren’s lives but for two and a half weeks there was hardly time to think about Charlotte’s diary. Indeed, in those busy days, I forgot that I had copied it into my journal even as my mind often wandered back to the lovely book that waited in Ann Arbor for my undivided attention.

Charlotte didn’t use this diary for her everyday schedule. She saw it instead as too fine an object to be handled daily. After her death, her husband and her sons also saw the diary as a treasure and like her memory they saved this treasure for years and years.

Charlotte herself might have been the one who instigated her family’s preservation of this book. Perhaps, when she saw her own death approaching, she decided to use this lovely book to keep alive for her children the memory of distant relatives. She stopped writing her own appointments in it and began writing dates she did not want her children to forget. She identified each of her brothers as "Uncle" as she jotted down their birthdays. Her own parents she refers to as "Grandma" and "Grandpa". The circumstances surrounding each inscribed date must have been full of memories for Charlotte, the weddings of her younger brothers, her own grandmother’s death, the birth of her nieces. In an important way, these unwritten memories are present though unrecorded, left behind to be found by others. Charlotte knew the diary would be saved. It was too beautiful to be cast away.

This diary given to Charlotte by her good friend, used for a short while and filled with only dated fragments of memories is today Charlotte only surviving written personal possession. It is a book that can be treasured not only for its beauty but for the memories which Charlotte sparingly wrote into it and which she silently passed on.

In order to spend time with the silent memory of each page, I worked very slowly through the copying process studying what Charlotte included and imagining what she left out. First, I wrote out each entry by hand. Then, through a series of time consuming steps, I electronically scanned each page. Next, the scanned pages were printed and an extra copy carefully photocopied. Finally, all the scans were uploaded and transferred to the World Wide Web. A virtual copy of Charlotte’s diary now lies here on this library shelf. Inside the lovely cover of this finely crafted book, one can read the silent tenacity of Charlotte’s efforts to pass her history forward.