Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary

December 15, 2021
Stories of New York Jewish lives in the 1970s. "You were like really always into being Jewish weren't you?" asks an old schoolmate of the narrator's in "Tales of My Great-Grandfathers," one of two new pieces included here along with all the stories from Other People's Lives, a collection originally published in 1975 to remarkable acclaim. Kaplan's debut won the Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Though she published just one more book, a novel called O My America! and both were long out of print, this reissue seems likely to find her a new set of fans. A warm introduction by Francine Prose alerts us to the joys of Kaplan's stories: "smart, uneasy, cranky heroines," "dialogue [with] the literary equivalent of perfect pitch," and so many delightful sentences you can literally open the book at random and find one. In "Sickness," Miriam, the cynical and whip-smart heroine of several stories, recalls running into an acquaintance ("on the dumb side") in Alexander's department store. The girl is so eager to show off her purchases she rips open a shopping bag full of what she believes to be "gorgeous underpants" in the middle of the store. Miriam is not sold. "It seemed to me that these nylon underpants with little hearts dancing over the crotch were the most ridiculous things I had ever seen....Suddenly I got the idea that if Andrea had underpants with two hearts embroidered on them, maybe if someone ever got a good look at her heart, they would find two little pairs of white underpants stitched on it." In "Sour or Suntanned, It Makes No Difference," Miriam is trapped at a Socialist-Zionist summer camp where she's reduced to watching insects buzz around a lightbulb for fun: "Miriam started to wonder whether these were Socialist bugs who believed in sharing with each other what they had, or else bugs who were secretly wishing to keep the whole bulb for themselves and, by politely flying close together, just faking it." Another such skeptic narrates "Babysitting," possibly the funniest story. Sent by the school guidance counselor to care for the children of "American's enigmatic wanderer-poet-playwright" Ted Marshak, she goes through his mail, answers his phone, reads a draft left lying on his desk. As with Miriam and the underpants, she's not impressed. Though some situations feel dated, snarky young ladies are timeless. Plus, the dialogue is to die for.

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Starred review from February 1, 2022

The latest addition to Ecco's eclectic and reliably rewarding "Art of the Story" series revives Kaplan's Jewish Book Award-winning 1975 collection Other People's Lives, now with two more essays. Dropping readers into those lives as they unfold in all their messy, egoistic imperfection, Kaplan offers sly glimpses of human foibles and vulnerabilities, often through the penetrating eyes of young misfits, latter-day Jane Eyres. The opening novella, "Other People's Lives," in which emotionally troubled Louise is abruptly moved from an upscale sanitarium into the raucous home of Maria, a German immigrant prone to malapropisms, is a tour de force of internal and external dialogue and monologue with all the eloquent verisimilitude of a Robert Altman film. VERDICT Francine Prose's preface aptly praises Kaplan's "paradoxically scathing and compassionate insight" into characters revealed in the midst of an uncertain present, poised between Old World and New. A rare gem, recovered.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2022
Kaplan plunges readers into family turmoil in New York City apartments as Jewish American life is being abruptly recalibrated in the stunned aftermath of the Holocaust. Kaplan's stories are driven by her acute ear for dialogue, especially that of displaced Europeans and people in cross-purpose conversations, the source of much pained humor. The observations of her standout narrators--smart, angry, vigilant Jewish girls (and, in one startling departure, a young woman of Chinese descent in Vietnam)--are equally rife with angst and hilarity. Kaplan's incisive attention to detail matches her gift for conveying the mysterious mesh of physicality and consciousness, while her characters' predicaments are at once ordinary and profound, specific yet universal in their illumination of inheritance, loss, exile, and generational divides. Kaplan's novella and short stories, first published in the 1970s and now rediscovered and republished, along with an autobiographical essay of startling beauty and intensity and a preface by Francine Prose, is part of a wave of exciting story reclamations that includes Bette Howland's Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (2019) and Hilma Wolitzer's Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket (2021).

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