Review of ‘Loss of Memory is Only Temporary.’ By Johanna Kaplan. Ecco Press, HarperCollins. New York, 2022. 248 pp. $16.99.
Mental Health, its circumstances, its manageable and unmanageable characteristics, its treatments, its colossal direct and indirect monetary impacts, its role in determining the fate of nations and our planet, all rumble along as codas in our symphonies of life.
In so-called “advanced” (i.e. industrialized, monetarized) cultures, almost everyone knows someone on a fluid spectrum between “weird” and “nuts.”
And a big percentage of us live in cultures whose direction has been and continues to be orchestrated by forces well out of anything that can be called healthy. Familiarity with history is hardly reassuring.
Sometimes an ethnicity defines, or seems to define, who “we” are. And when that ethnicity contains “race” or “religion” based strictures we are cruising in often dangerous water.
Johanna Kaplan, the 80-year old author of well received short stories and novels about Jews and Jewishness seems indigenous to such climes.
Kaplan “broke through” the genre of ethnic fiction to become heir to a tradition that included Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Bernard Malamud. But even when her stories and books began to be published after World War II, she benefitted via what had transpired as she was growing up. Fascism in Europe. Intellectual justification for exclusion and mass murder of Jews. People who bought, inherited, or built publishing empires, different from the publishing empires that evolved over decades.
Jews had a head start in the creation of such empires. Knopf, Cerf, Stein, and Straus created a penumbra apart from Harper, Scribner, McGraw and their ilk.
Moreover,”, if you were a “brain” (later known as ‘nerds) you started young studying centuries of texts, which no “layman” could ever read, understand, and retain. Many tried. But their efforts were stymied by a rigorous institutional sexism. Women were excluded from places (synagogues, schools) where texts were taught.
As I was growing up and penetrating the nearly total taboo on in depth discussion of Jews and their fate the silence was deafening. We had few politicians who braved the silence, since getting elected meant keeping silent, even in “Jew York.” Even when the second most powerful political person in the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, did what she could, she failed. Her husband, the otherwise estimable FDR, listened to her and then did very little of what he could have done to restrain the exterminist insanity disgracing Germany, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere.
In the streets of New York, where I grew up, and where Kaplan migrated as a young woman, one could see “crazy” people everywhere. Some, although they didn’t have to, wore gold stars, identifying themselves as Jews. Some begged in the streets, or knocked on doors, or tried to find anonymity in parks. They were sorry spectacles that other Jews tried to disavow, or chase away. My mother, who early on joined Jewish solidarity groups whose sole purpose was to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East, knew that even if she and every Jewish woman she knew in Brooklyn protested the derangement of a small number of Jews, nothing would change. Not until an activist women, Elizabeth Holzman, defeated a long-time Jewish Congressman, Emannuel Celler in a 1972 primary did the Jewish establishment began to flinch.)
The most listened to radio program in the United States was a weekly harangue by a Michigan religious figure (Father Coughlin) who preached hatred. “The Eagle,” the most widely circulated weekly newspaper in my Brooklyn home district population , was a bigoted screed, professionally written and edited by identifiable Christian extremists. Only Catholics bought it.
The effect of such an unmelted melting pot on Jews is the constant referent in Johanna Kaplan’s latest novel, “Loss of Memory is Only Temporary.”
In their “professional development” for fields like psychiatry or psychology Jews in her academic experience produced written studies for each other to ponder. One imaginary professor’s product, , deliciously created by Kaplan, is “…the Psychoanalytic Ego and Mechanisms of Defense…Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory, Wayward Youth Searchlights on Delinquency …the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child…Men Under Stress, Patterns of Mothering Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Dreams and the Uses of Regression.”
Pasting these abstruse categories onto real people with symptoms is a recipe for confusion to replace complexity. Children, for whom a certain amount of seeking is part of growth, get even more lost and confused. The grown-ups get more frustrated that their kids aren’t “normal.”
On and on.
Every Jewish kid knew someone who wore long sleeves to hide their tattooed concentration camp numbers. Kids, nevertheless, exchanged information about the long-sleeved and made fun of its bearer.
The adults all knew someone like those who Tadeusz Borowski describes in his iconic 1959 epic, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” The narrator has a job helping to unload exhausted deportees at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where most were killed within minutes of their arrival.
“I seize a corpse at the unloading dock the fingers close tightly around mine. I pull back with a shriek and stagger away. My heart pounds, jumps up in my throat. I can no longer control the nausea. Hunched under the train I begin to vomit. Then, like a drunk, I weave over to the stack of rails…Suddenly I see the
Camp as a haven of peace. It is true, others may be dying, but one is somehow still alive, one has enough food, enough strength to work…
“The lights on the ramp flicker with a spectral glow, the wave of people –feverish, agitated stupefied people ---flows on and on, endlessly. They think that now they will have to face a new life in the camp, and they prepare themselves emotionally for the hard struggle ahead. They do not know that in just a few moments they will die, that the gold, money, and diamonds which they have so prudently hidden in their clothing and on their bodies are now useless to them. Experienced professionals will probe into every recess of their flesh, will pull the gold from under the tongue and the diamonds from the uterus and the colon….”
What ruminative writers like Kaplan (and there are very few) bring to fiction isn’t all that impossible to identify. It’s accessibility.
First Kaplan has observed decades of human behavior radiating from her Jewish identity. Every ethnicity has its eccentrics and crazies. Many families recapitulate these in micro. But if we’re lucky, we get to develop our insights into these from not just observation and interaction, but from knowledge. No such activity was possible until the inventions of the 19th Century which led to “media.” There were only so many hand-copied religious texts that could be hand copied. But then there was an increasingly rapid proliferation, an infinite number of texts that could be reproduced with moveable type replacing hand copying.
Content became uncontrollable. Religious control escaped the agency of faith. Faith became divorced from provable facts. Imagination was given license.
None of this meant, or means, that the activities of people and animals can be limited to “scientific” analysis. Or that so limiting it makes it more engaging. Or funny. Kaplan’s genius had me laughing all the time.
Humor in fiction is either one-liners or endless prose/imagination construction. “Loss of Memory is Only Temporary” is almost impossible to extract, so long are such constructions in the hands of Kaplan. She has pitch-perfection in character delineation, as in describing a contemporary who has “gone native” in the midwestern woods.
“No matter what your eye hit, - her Laplanders boots, wool Scottish plaid slacks, long Mexican serape pushed over a turtleneck Irish fisherman’s sweater, a child’s bright red furry earmuffs half covered by a multicolored flower-filled East European peasant kerchief, Rebecca looked like a package that had been sent on from one wrong foreign address to another, receiving at each mistaken customs office its country’s distinctive stamp.”
Cheap, poorly designed and built apartments were where ghetto Jews lied, in distant parts of New York boroughs Brooklyn and the Bronx. “..the awful clang of the plumbing that went on constantly, vibrating through many apartments when it was used, The awful noises neighbors made, like the neighbor next door to Louise. Every night he yelled the same wild karate commands and apparently knocked over large pieces of furniture. He kept it up for a long time and when the throwing and yelling part was over, he laughed in a loud, stupid, braying voice. Beside it you could hear a girl’s voice giggling and shrieking, high pitched and equally stupid.
Do you. Want to imagine yourself in such places? Should you read “Loss of Memory is Only Temporary?”
Even if you’re long past such age, adolescence is a guarantee that awkward , painful scenes will occur. That uninformed decisions will be made. That hormones are mysterious.
Ah, Johanna Kaplan! A guarantee you will be sucked into her tale, of these decisions unfolding, so well does she weave it, how curious is its “denouement” immersing in the narrative will probably ruin whatever spoilers you thought might be coming.
For me, it’s already among major choice for novel of the year. And the year still has ten months to go!
(Larry Bensky can be reached at LBensky@igc.org.)
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