Johanna Kaplan

A funny, fresh, and brilliantly insightful collection of stories from a beloved writer, with a new introduction by Francine Prose Johanna Kaplan's beautifully written stories first burst on the literary scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today they have retained all of their depth, surprise, and humor--their simultaneously scathing, hilarious, and compassionate insight into character and behavior. From Miriam, home from school with the measles, to Louise, the daughter of a family that fled Vienna for the Dominican Republic, to Naomi, a young psychiatrist, her heroines are fierce, tender, funny, and cuttingly smart. At once specific to a particular period, place, and milieu--mainly, Jewish New York in the decades after World War II--Kaplan's stories resonate with universal significance. In this new collection, which includes both early and later stories, unforgettably vivid characters are captured in all of their forceful presence and singularity, their foolishness and their wisdom, their venality and their nobility, while, hovering in the background, the inexorable passage of time and the unending pull of memory render silent judgment. In its pitch-perfect command of dialogue matched with interwoven subtleties of insight and feeling and a masterful control of language, Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary is itself a timeless collection of the finest work by one of the most extraordinary talents of our age.

Stories

Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary

A delightfully funny and moving novel about the singular life of a cantankerous Jewish-American writer and anarchist troublemaker, as remembered by his daughter In 1972, sixty-four-year-old Ezra Slavin's heart gives out at an anti-war rally. A contentious and irascible Jewish-American writer, anarchist, and inadvertent guru to discontented youth, he leaves behind a large extended family of ex-wives, lovers, and children, most of whom had cut all ties with the infuriating intellectual provocateur years earlier. Out of the entire family, only one daughter, Merry, a journalist, can remember her father with her own critical, conflicted understanding, a saddened sympathy approaching love. As the day of his memorial approaches, she attempts to make sense of the puzzle of Ezra's life before all of its disparate, discordant elements come crashing together at the service. The award-winning author of Other People's Lives, Johanna Kaplan creates a vivid cast of unforgettable characters who reveal the disparity between Ezra's long-suffering, neglected family, his admiring friends, and the youthful hangers-on--and, most notably, in the outrageously enigmatic Ezra himself. At once hilarious and poignant, O My America! offers a fascinating evocation of a time and place in America, a satiric history of the immigrant Jewish experience, and a wonderful portrait of an exasperating yet endearing anti-hero pursuing his unique vision of the American dream.

Johanna Kaplan

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