Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary: Beloved American Short Stories of Jewish NYC Women, Humor, and Memory (Art of the Story)

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. 

Johanna Kaplan is the author of Other People's Lives, a collection of stories, and O My America!, a novel. Her books were finalists for the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and she has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for fiction, as well as the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and the Kenneth B. Smilen/Present Tense Literary Award. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Commentary, Harper's Magazine, Moment, the New York Times Book Review, and City Journal, and her stories have been widely anthologized. Her essay "Tales of My Great-Grandfathers" appears in the Schocken anthology Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer. A native New Yorker, she lives in Manhattan and for many years worked as a teacher of emotionally disturbed children at Mount Sinai Hospital. She is currently at work on a novel with the tentative title Forbidden.

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised 1974: A Person History, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.