“Kaplan’s achievement, which continues to make her fiction relevant, is the creation of ?'ferociously observant,' embattled-yet-avid young women who possess a complicated consciousness. With remarkable insight and empathy, Kaplan, like the characters in these stories, troubles the surfaces of Jewish family life, revealing an emotional landscape marked by grief and trauma. In the process, Kaplan reawakens the distinctive, and slowly disappearing, Bronx voices of mid-twentieth-century Jewish New York. Both old and new readers will relish Kaplan’s brilliant artwork of ventriloquism.” — Jewish Book Council
“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.” — Booklist
“A warm, funny, Jewish collection of stories featuring bold and nuanced Jewish women.” — Alma
"This reissue seems likely to find [Kaplan] a new set of fans...Snarky young ladies are timeless. Plus, the dialogue is to die for." — Kirkus Reviews
“A joy of discovery attends the publication of Johanna Kaplan’s Loss of Memory is Only Temporary (Ecco)—a volume that gathers her cacophonous, mordantly funny stories from the 1960s and ‘70s (and includes the contents of her prized debut, Other People’s Lives)… It fizzes with the urbane energy of J.D. Salinger, Grace Paley, and Deborah Eisenberg—a restless delight.” — Vogue
“Kaplan offers sly glimpses of human foibles and vulnerabilities. . . . 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.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Readers…can learn much from Ms. Kaplan…This is fiction of complexity and depth.”
— Wall Street Journal
“Laced with humor and high spirits…talent and wit everywhere play through [Kaplan's] writings.” — Commentary
“The reappearance of some of Johanna Kaplan’s brilliant short stories in Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary is cause for celebration…Hers is a distinctive voice with an uncannily pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, in any language and in any accent." — Hadassah Magazine
"One of the most remarkable features of Kaplan’s collection is the uncanny way that the past comes looping back around, the same characters and images recurring in different times and stories...The past, Kaplan shows us, infiltrates even the most private spaces of the imagination." — Jewish Review of Books