Howard Lovy

Category: Fiction

  • 1972 Diaspora Blues: A Jewish Kid in Georgia

    1972 Diaspora Blues: A Jewish Kid in Georgia

    The following is an excerpt from my work in progress. It will be incorporated into my second novel, which has the working title of Diaspora Blues. I haven’t yet changed any names. This really happened.

    I’m glad I didn’t see it for myself. The way my father described it was bad enough. My three beautiful black cats had been tortured, their whiskers cut, their fur singed with cigarette burns. Our house had been vandalized, anti-Jewish epithets painted on the wall. Of all the houses on our street, why was ours chosen for this treatment? Why were our pets singled out for abuse? It was obvious to me. How else are we different from others in our neighborhood? At the age of nine, after having lived in Georgia for four years, I knew of only one way in which we were different.

    We had pulled into our driveway in the summer of 1975 after a long vacation out west, and my dad could tell something was wrong with the house. He told us to wait in the camper while he went inside. He was gone only a few minutes before he came back, climbed back into the driver’s seat, and drove us out of the Confederacy for good. We did not stop until we hit Michigan. I never even got to say goodbye to my friends.

    But to really understand why we left Georgia and why our house was targeted, we need to go back three years, before the Yom Kippur War, to 1972, when our school was forced to comply with a federal school integration order. For the first time, black students were going to be bused into A. Brian Merry Elementary School, where I was attending the first grade.

    Read the entire excerpt on my Substack Newsletter.

  • Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story

    Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story

    Esoterica Magazine has published a chapter of my new novel, Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story. It’s a love letter to music and an examination of aging, regret, love, religion, and second chances. It’s set in present-day Interlochen, Michigan, and the music scene in Greenwich Village in the mid-’80s. The book chronicles the lives of two middle-aged musicians whose forty-year-old song accidentally goes viral, forcing them to navigate through fame and new choices late in life. It also takes place in 1985, when they were teenage street musicians in NYC.

    And that was what the crowds had turned out for, to see if they could still perform those perfect harmonies. The voices that sang to them in those viral videos were teenagers from 1985. They had an optimism and innocence about them that proved contagious in the more-cynical days of 2025. They were real. They were not Auto-Tuned, AI-enhanced, or otherwise tampered with.

    Yet there still was an otherworldly feel to them, an angelic perfection that sounded complete only when Jake and Cait sang together. Jake was partially correct when he told Cait that people were buying into their story as well as their music. They were one and the same. Their music would not exist without the story that goes along with it. Something about love and music that was so pure and undiluted with cynicism dialed into the mood of the times and through multiple generations, from Boomers to Z’ers.

    And the fact that the partnership was doomed to an expiration date of only six months in 1985 only added to the legend and myth. Of course something that pure could not last long. Too much of that syrupy sweetness could lead to high blood sugar. There was a beginning, and middle, and an end. And that was where it probably could have stayed.

    But the public demanded more. They wanted the epilogue. They wanted to see what became of their fairy tale. It didn’t end with “happily ever after,” and the world wanted closure. So, they dragged two reluctant middle-aged humans out into the spotlight and told them to perform like angels.

    Instead, what they got was an aging man and woman, with more creases on their faces than they were comfortable with. If the crowd squinted a certain way, perhaps they could see those young visages that called across the decades, but it took too much imagination. When the cameras arrived at the rehearsal and beamed Jake and Cait’s images onto two large screens set up on the sides of the stage, there was an audible gasp from the crowd as they looked at what their two angels had become.

    Read the entire chapter at Esoterica Magazine