LemuriaBooks

"It’s 1924, and Lillian Leyb, from Turov, Russia, has just made her way through Ellis Island to Manhattan. Life on the Lower East Side may be tough, but wily Lillian is prepared for it. When hungry, she steals what she thinks won’t be noticed (“She borrows, is what she says to herself — she just borrows like crazy”). When she detects the faint Yiddish accent of a man hiring seamstresses for the Goldfadn Theater, she makes a move for the job. Never mind that she can’t really sew, knows hardly any English and is elbowing aside a more-qualified friend. And when, later on, the man makes a move on her, she acquiesces — even though she has already become his son’s mistress.

"Lillian will endure almost anything because nothing can be worse than what she has already survived — a pogrom in which her family was butchered: “She was an orphan, a widow and the mother of a dead child, for which there’s not even a special word, it’s such a terrible thing.” Lillian’s grim plight and past are never far from the narrative of Amy Bloom’s new novel. Every night, Lillian dreams of the bloody bodies of her parents and husband, and of the chicken coop where she’d ordered her daughter, Sophie, to hide. But Lillian persists. “Az me muz, ken men.” When one must, one can.

"The first half of “Away” is a vivid immigrant tale, and Bloom (the author of a previous novel and two collections of short stories) nicely captures Lillian’s everyday struggles — from battling that stubborn “v” in her English (“won’t, not von’t”) to being a mistress twice over, scratching and clawing for a living she’s not sure is worth it. Other moments are funny and surprisingly sweet: the almost erotic pleasure of Lillian’s first taste of ice cream; the giddiness of whirling in a waltz with the wickedly funny, generous Yaakov Shimmelman (whose business card reads “Tailor, Actor, Playwright. Author of ‘The Eyes of Love.’ Pants pressed and altered”). But such small delights seem hollow to a heroine who can come across as hollow herself. Considering her horrific past, this is perhaps understandable. “ ‘I am a waltzing cadaver,’ ” declares Yaakov, who has seen his own unendurable tragedies. “ ‘You know.’ And she does. ”

"In its second half, however, the novel takes off — when Lillian’s cousin, Raisele, newly arrived from Russia, announces that Lillian’s daughter is still alive. Unsure whether to believe her conniving cousin (who has broken into Lillian’s apartment, donning her dressing gown and preparing to faint for dramatic effect), Lillian must take a chance on the possibility that she’s telling the truth. Too poor to buy a ticket for a voyage back across the Atlantic, she appeals to Yaakov, who charts her a course across the United States — to Siberia by way of Alaska.

"With every passing mile, “Away” gains traction and steam. Lillian travels from New York to Chicago to Seattle, smuggled along in locked closets by not-always-kindly train porters, then takes the cheapest passage on a ship to Alaska and finally sets out on foot. As Lillian continues her journey, Bloom fills a vast canvas with brilliantly sketched characters. In Seattle, Lillian is rescued by a black prostitute with a trousseau of little girls’ clothes and a keen mind for business. In Canada, she lands in a correctional institute and meets, among a crowd of misfits and miscreants, a marvelously rendered Chinese con woman. Even minor figures — a humble Mormon boy, a lady card shark — leave indelible marks.

"Yet Lillian is less well imagined. For all the insight that Bloom, herself a psychotherapist, gives her heroine, Lillian seems more like the subject of a respectful biography than a character built from the inside out. Her journey, rather than her personality, becomes the focus of the story. Lillian is defined by a single quality: her irreducible will. “It is so frail and delicate at night that she can’t even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and binding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day.”

"Bloom doesn’t always flatter Lillian, but she’s always in awe of her — and this leads to a few missteps. Bloom’s desire to bring Lillian’s extraordinary past into the present (and, indeed, the present tense) can be too urgent and portentous. (“It is always like this,” the novel begins.) Dialogue is sometimes rendered without quotation marks, as if hedging its claim to reality. And occasionally Bloom’s incantatory style is excessive. (When Raisele tells Lillian that her daughter is alive, “hawks and sparrows drop down from the blackened sky.”)

"But such clumsy moments are far outnumbered by the elegant and surprising moves of Bloom’s plot. Not least of these is her demonstration of how plausibly love is found in unexpected corners, for different reasons — and sometimes for no reason at all. "

Published: September 2, 2007