In her fiction Johanna Kaplan explores the Jewish experience in America, especially as it has been lived in New York City. Her concern is with the fully integrated, Americanized generation that grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Jewishness and the Jewish tradition remain important for her characters, but neither of these defines them, for their experience is as American as it is Jewish.

Kaplan was born in New York, grew up in the borough of the Bronx, and attended Music and Art High School in Manhattan. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, received a B.A. from New York University in 1964, and earned a master's degree in special education from Teacher's College, Columbia University in 1966. Her father, Max Kaplan, was born and raised on New York's Lower East Side and became a New York City school-teacher. Her mother, Ruth Duker Kaplan, was born in Poland and...