Kaplan’s Plot by Jason Diamond
(Flatiron Books)
September 16, 2025
JASON DIAMOND’S debut novel is made up of two parallel storylines. The first concerns Elijah Mendes, a 30-something schlemiel, forced to move back in with his mother in Chicago after his Silicon Valley start-up dreams go bust. He then discovers a rabbi is trying to cajole his mother into selling a large piece of property, bought by his grandfather, that he never even knew their family owned: a Jewish cemetery.
The second storyline tracks the life of Mendes’s grandfather, Yitz Kaplan, who arrives in di goldene medina as a child fleeing pogroms and scrabbles up Chicago’s criminal underworld into the midwestern middle class. Between these two narrative threads, Diamond seems poised to fall into a long tradition of writers that includes the likes of Mordecai Richler, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Safran Foer: Jewish men whose stories are filled with sharply funny dark humour, and characters plagued by nervous conditions, unachieved potential, and intergenerational angst. Zachary Kauffman
