Johanna Kaplan Biography

(2000) What I aim for in my work, both for my readers and for myself, is that self-transcendent state we all remember from the ecstasy of reading in childhood. In other words, a deep plunge into the world of otherness—not at all surreal or magical otherness, but rather an intense imaginative joining with lives going on about us which we might otherwise only guess at: a face glimpsed from a bus window, a transaction overheard in a store. Who are these people is what I want to know; what are their lives really like? Such (gossipy) wonderings instigate my fiction. I think it's also fair to say that I am concerned with the ways in which the past, specifically Jewish history, has a way of peeking and poking through to the everyday present.

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