Reviewing the recently re-published fiction of both Johanna Kaplan and the late Bette Howland, Joseph Epstein notes that the two writers have a few things in common: both are Jews of the same generation, both wrote for Commentary, and both went through long creative dry spells. What’s more, Epstein writes, “each might have made a convincing character in the fiction of the other.” He describes Kaplan’s work:
Kaplan writes chiefly about Jewish immigrants who fled Hitler to arrive in America, some of them with the telling tattoo of the death camps on their forearms. The land of the free and the home of the brave for these migrants is never easy. They tend to live on the old, pre-gentrified West Side of Manhattan. They worry about muggers, but even more about the thinness of American culture and the confusion of the country’s values. Many are what were once known as “kooks,” the neurotic element strong in them. “Forgive yourself your neuroses,” one character in her novel advises another. They do not let their awkwardness with English get in the way of their complaints. . . . They are preponderantly women, while the narrators of her stories are often young girls, American-born, trying to understand a world larger than the one they were born into.
A passage from Howland’s essay “Golden Age” well describes many of Kaplan’s characters: “These people were all old Jews. Judging from the accents I heard around me, most of them had come over on the boat. They were not, as the jargon goes, assimilated. . . . And yet their status is symbolic. This is no country for old men. All of them must be in the same boat; they are not entirely of America, either.”
The work of both is laced with humor and high spirits; talent and wit everywhere play through their writings. Yet their stories and essays do not bring a lot in the way of good news, or pay much attention to the rich variety and amusement of modern life. . . . Style is a great preservative in literature and the quality that both Bette Howland’s and Johanna Kaplan’s writing possess in abundance, and the reason their work has proved worth preserving.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/joseph-epstein/women-writers-johanna-kaplan-bette-howland/