Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary audiobook

These stories explore, among other things, family relationships and mental illness. Many of their protagonists are Jewish girls coming of age in the Bronx in the years after World War II, as Kaplan herself once was. They are not fully familiar with the details of what their parents and grandparents faced in the old country, but they know two things: it was bad, and it was important.It’s such a heavy weight to carry that one character says, simply, “I hate history.”Read my full article in the Forward here:https://forward.com/culture/481884/bo...

Loss of Memory is only Temporary is a collection of short stories which I found very enjoyable and inspiring. The stories cross different genres. The book is a very fast read and each story is well-written, fast paced and memorable. Highly recommend!

This is a beautiful collection of stories, which includes early and later novels, about unforgettably vivid characters. I especially loved the preface by Francine Prose and Maira Kalman's beautiful cover illustration.A passage I loved from "Sour or Suntanned" about that sharp-eyed girl in camp is when the author wrote, "From behind all the black lines, Fran's eyes looked as if she was already set to start flirting, but even so, her arm would not let go of Miriam's shoulder. It was just another thing that Miriam did not like. Simply going from one activity to another, the whole bunk walked with their arms linked around each other's waist. At flag-lowering, you joined hands and swayed in a semi-circle. In swimming, you had to jump for someone else's dripping hand the second the whistle blew, and at any time, there were counselors standing with their arms around kids for no particular reason. They were all people you hardly knew and would probably never see again. There was no reason to spend a whole summer hugging them."This is another passage from "Other People's Lives." "Rebecca's arm was still around Maria. They had reached the house but continued standing outside it. In her cold and discomfort, Louise concentrated on the odd quality of Rebecca's voice. She had quacked French verbs at students for so many years that now, without knowing it, she could not stop the quacking. Worse, she plowed down on words and consonants with lingering lopsided lips and with her tongue, emphasized the sounds that students, in a dictation, might have forgotten to underline." To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...

A delight to read. A note from the preface that sums this collection up well for me:“The experience of these characters…remind me, all too clearly, of what it was like to be young: to feel that I existed on sufferance, that clear-sightedness was not a gift but a burden, that the people around me were more or less untrustworthy and hopelessly benighted; I remember how it felt to wish, as does one of Kaplan’s characters, that I could follow a family glimpsed on a city bus — and exchange my life for theirs.”

I listen to this book on audible. The accent of the narrator was to say the least interesting. Anybody who is narrating a book with JEWISH or Yiddish accents should learn how to properly pronounce certain words. But enough about the audiobook. They are number of very very funny stories in this book especially the one about the summer camp where Kaplan identifies the Israeli theatrical producer and the roles of the various kids at camp and all the shenanigans that go on in girls bunks.