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AWAY by Amy Bloom
On Sale: June 24th
Paperback
256 pages
ISBN-10: 0812977793
ISBN-13: 9780812977790
Panoramic in scope, AWAY is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom's work --- her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart --- come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.
Amy Bloom is the author of COME TO ME, a National Book Award finalist; A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; LOVE INVENTS US; and NORMAL. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Bloom teaches creative writing at Yale University. Visit www.amybloom.com for more information.
Amy Bloom is a psychotherapist by profession. In her second novel, a transcendent exploration of the power of maternal love, she brings to bear the novelist's imagination and the therapist's insight to produce a work of fiction that blends skillful storytelling with memorable characters to create a classic quest narrative.
AWAY is set in the rowdy world of America of the 1920s. Its protagonist, Lillian Leyb, is a young Jewish woman from Lithuania whose husband and parents have been slaughtered in a savage pogrom, the memory of which haunts her dreams. With Lillian's aid, her three-year-old daughter Sophie escapes execution. But when an aunt reports she has seen Sophie's body floating in the river, Lillian decides to abandon her village for life with a cousin in the crowded Jewish tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Shortly after her arrival, Lillian finds a job as a seamstress in the prominent Yiddish theater run by Reuben Burstein and featuring his actor-son, Meyer. Soon, the Bursteins are competing for Lillian's affections in an odd sexual triangle while they help educate her about life in America.
But the new world into which Lillian has begun to settle is upended when her cousin Raisele arrives in the United States, claiming that Sophie was not killed in the pogrom, but instead has been adopted by another family from the village and spirited away to a nascent Jewish community in Siberia. Armed with this information and the faint glimmer of hope it inspires, Lillian is determined to return to Russia to find her daughter. In the words of a Yiddish proverb that serves as one of the novel's leitmotifs: Az me muz, ken men (When one must, one can).
Lillian decides to book passage on ship that will take her to Odessa, leaving a perilous 3,000-mile trek to Siberia where any possibility of finding Sophie is slim at best. Before she can do that, she yields to the even more preposterous suggestion of her friend and fellow Burstein compatriot, Yaakov Shimmelman --- "tailor, actor, playwright" --- that she head west across the United States and eventually make her way over the Bering Strait into Siberia.
The final two-thirds of the novel traces Lillian's harrowing and heroic journey to find Sophie. She travels by train from New York to Chicago and then on to Seattle, spending most of the trip in a dark and fetid broom closet. When she reaches the West Coast she is rescued from a beating by a prostitute named Gumdrop Brown, who eventually enlists Lillian in a scheme to exact revenge on Gumdrop's pimp, who has been skimming moneys owed her. That plan ends in catastrophe and Lillian flees to Canada, encountering Christian missionaries and spending time in a women's correctional institution along the way. When she's released she trudges on her solitary path through the wilderness of northern British Columbia, following a trail of abandoned telegraph stations, into the Yukon Territory, where she finds one man willing to join in her passionate journey.
In cool, unflinching prose, Bloom makes us feel each step of Lillian's painful and sometimes terrifying quest. Without resorting to melodramatic flourishes, she enlists our emotions on the side of her heroine, who is compelled to move forward against all obstacles by a force that is almost beyond understanding. "Lillian believes in luck and hunger," Bloom writes. "She believes in fear as a motivator and she believes in curiosity…and she believes in 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."
It's apparent that in writing AWAY, Bloom has immersed herself in vivid accounts of American life in the 1920s. The worlds of Chicago street toughs, Seattle prostitutes and radio operators in the Canadian wilderness are portrayed with a kind of grim lyricism. Bloom does not linger over the stark and sometimes terrible scenes she paints, and yet all are depicted in rich and sensuous detail.
In a recent interview, Bloom observed that being a mother has influenced the themes she writes about. That influence is profoundly evident in AWAY. It's difficult to bring to mind a recent novel in which the motivating power of a mother's love has been so deeply or affectingly portrayed.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
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A Conversation with Amy Bloom
Random House Reader's Circle: AWAY is loosely based on a real woman in history. Can you tell us a bit about her life, and how you came upon her story? Ultimately, how did you make her story your own?
Amy Bloom: I don't know that I'd call Lillian Alling a "real woman in history." There've always been bits and fragments of a story about a foreign woman, mute or silent by choice, who came up the Telegraph Trail, determined to walk to Russia. There are no records of her arriving in Ellis Island and no records of her life in Alaska and, of course, one of the first questions is: If she didn't speak, how did they know where she was going? I ignored all the fanciful parts and also all the shoddy investigations into her story (this was the golden age of yellow journalism --- when whole wars were made up to sell papers) and thought instead: If you weren't crazy or particularly adventurous, why would you make this extraordinary trip? And I thought, I would only do it for love.
RHRC: Lillian Leyb's journey takes her across the globe, from Russia to New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle, to Alaska, to Siberia. Did you chart out her epic journey before writing? How did you conceive the arc of the novel?
AB: I sat down with a former student and a bottle of wine and dictated a forty-page outline to him. We wrapped it up at about four in the morning. The outline included a million unanswered questions, which led to all my research, and it also provided the entrances and exits of some of my favorite characters. This journey is as much about Lillian becoming alive again, and becoming an American, as it is about anything else.
RHRC: AWAY captures the mood of the Roaring Twenties, both in the rhythms of your language and in the atmosphere that you create. What sort of historical research did you undertake? What about the period captured your imagination to begin with?
AB: The Roaring Twenties only roared for some people. For lots of working people, it was a fast-paced world, but not one with hip flasks and flappers. The thing that truly captured my imagination was the way in which the twenties were so much like our modern world; they had everything we had (corruption, advertising, rapid transit, the cult of celebrity, expanded sense of sexuality) except television and computers. I researched in libraries from Alaska (which has extraordinary archives of first-person accounts) to Yale's Sterling Library (which is just around the corner from a good cup of coffee) to making use, like everyone else, of all the search engines.
RHRC: This novel is filled with so many colorful characters, from the theater idol, Meyer Burstein, to the hardscrabble call girl, Gumdrop, to the loveable convict, Chinky Chang. Do you have a favorite character in the novel? Whose voice stands out to you most, and why?
AB: I love them all and they are all parts of me. My elegant sister, a hardworking and very upright lawyer says, "Gumdrop, c'est moi." Gumdrop's conflicts between love and practicality appeal to me, as does Chinky's capacity to fall in love instantly. I also love Arthur Gilpin and his second wife, Lorena, a cardsharp who chooses love over glamour and money. The voice that is always with me is the omniscient narrator, the God's Eye.
RHRC: The third-person omniscient narrator allows the novel to jump forward and backward in time and between parallel narratives. Tell us a little bit about your decision to use this technique. Why did you want the reader to know what happened to Sophie, even though Lillian herself never learns? Do you think Lillian ever stopped looking for Sophie?
AB: The omniscient narrator is God's Eye on this world. The Eye can see into the past, into the future, and make connections that would not be available to the characters (Gumdrop doesn't know that she is like Lenin). Lillian stops looking for Sophie, but never stops watching for her, never completely gives up the habit of holding her breath when she sees a brown braid tied with a blue ribbon, even fifty years after they have last seen each other. We see what happens to Sophie, as we do with all of the characters; what will be is part of the story.
RHRC: What significance do the chapter titles have? What are they derived from? And can you tell us why you decided to call the novel AWAY?
AB: Each of the chapter titles is a song title. The first half are Yiddish or Russian lullabies; the second half are American folk songs or Christian hymns.
The book's title is simple, to balance the complexity of the plot. It's also one of those words that has in it both coming and going. I go away, I come away; I leave here, to go away and must go away again, in order to come home.
RHRC: As the author of a number of award-winning short story collections including COME TO ME and A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU, how did you approach writing a novel? Do you find it more challenging, or more freeing, to write in a longer narrative form?
AB: I approached writing this novel as I would a large, dangerous animal whom it might be possible to work with, if not to tame. I tried to apply the discipline of my short story writing (no longueurs, no self-indulgent riffs or pointless dialogue) to the novel, so that it would be dense, but not too long, full of characters but not baggy.
RHRC: We'd love to know what you'll be working on next --- can you share any details of your next book?
AB: It's set in pre-World War Two America, in both the Boston Brahmin part of Beacon Hill and the make-it-up-as-we-go world of Hollywood at that time. At the center are two half-sisters, their mothers, and their father.
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Chapter 1
And Lost There, a Golden Feather in a Foreign, Foreign Land
It is always like this: the best parties are made by people in trouble.
There are one hundred and fifty girls lining the sidewalk outside the Goldfadn Theatre. They spill into the street and down to the corners and Lillian Leyb, who has spent her first thirty-five days in this country ripping stitches out of navy silk flowers until her hands were dyed blue, thinks that it is like an all-girl Ellis Island: American-looking girls chewing gum, kicking their high heels against the broken pavement, and girls so green they’re still wearing fringed brown shawls over their braided hair. The street is like her village on market day, times a million. A boy playing a harp; a man with an accordion and a terrible, patchy little animal; a woman selling straw brooms from a basket strapped to her back, making a giant fan behind her head; a colored man singing in a pink suit and black shoes with pink spats; and tired women who look like women Lillian would have known at home in Turov, smiling at the song, or the singer. Some of the girls hold red sparklers in their hands and swing one another around the waist. A big girl with black braids plays the tambourine. A few American-looking girls make a bonfire on the corner, poking potatoes in and out of it. Two older women, pale and dark-eyed, are pulling along their pale, dark-eyed children. That’s a mistake, Lillian thinks. They should ask a neighbor to watch the children. Or just leave the children in Gallagher’s Bar and Grille at this point and hope for the best, but that’s the kind of thing you say when you have no child. Lillian makes herself smile at the children as she walks past the women; they reek of bad luck.
Lillian is lucky. Her father had told her so; he told everyone after she fell in the Pripiat twice and didn’t drown and didn’t die of pneumonia. He said that smart was good (and Lillian was smart, he said) and pretty was useful (and Lillian was pretty enough) but lucky was better than both of them put together. He had hoped she’d be lucky her whole life, he said, and she had been, at the time.
He also said, You make your own luck, and Lillian takes Judith, the only girl she knows, by the hand and they push their way through the middle of the crowd and then to the front. They are pushed themselves, then, into the place they want to be, the sewing room of the Goldfadn Theatre. They find themselves inches away from a dark, angry woman with a tight black bun (“Litvak,” Judith says immediately; her mother was a Litvak).
Suddenly, there are two men right in front of them, who, even the greenest girls can see, are stars in the firmament of life, visitors from a brighter, more beautiful planet. Mr. Reuben Burstein, owner of the Goldfadn and the Bartelstone theaters, the Impresario of Second Avenue, with his barrel chest and black silk vest and gray hair brushed back like Beethoven’s. And his son, Mr. Meyer Burstein, the Matinee Idol, the man whose Yankl in The Child of Nature was so tragically handsome, so forceful a dancer, so sweet a tenor, that when he romanced the gentile Russian girl Natasha, women in the audience wept as if their husbands had abandoned them, and when Yankl killed himself, unwilling to marry poor pregnant Natasha and live as a Christian, everyone wept, not unhappily, at his beautiful, tortured death. Meyer Burstein is taller than his father, with a smart black fedora, a cigarette, and no vest over his silk shirt.
The two men move through the crowd like gardeners inspecting the flower beds of English estates, like plantation owners on market day. Whatever it is like, Lillian doesn’t care. She will be the flower, the slave, the pretty thing or the despised and necessary thing, as long as she is the thing chosen from among the other things.
Mr. Burstein the elder stands close to Lillian and makes an announcement. His voice is such a pleasure to listen to that the girls stand there like fools, some of them with tears in their eyes at its gathering, thunderous quality, even as he is merely telling them that Miss Morris (the Litvak) will pass around a clipboard and they are to write down their names and their skills, or have someone write this down for them, and then Miss Morris will interview them all and indicate who should return tomorrow evening for more interviewing. There is a murmur at this; it was not so easy to get away for even one night, and Lillian thinks that the bad-luck mothers and the women who look as if they’ve walked from Brooklyn will not be back.
Miss Morris approaches Lillian. Judith and Lillian have rehearsed for this moment. “Very well, thank you,” if the question seems to be about her health; “I am a seamstress --- my father was a tailor,” if the question contains the words “sew,” “costume,” or “work”; “I attend night classes,” said with a dazzling smile in response to any question she doesn’t understand. Judith will get the job. Things being what they are, Lillian knows that a girl who can sew and speak English is a better choice than a girl who just got here and can barely do either.
Lillian studies the profile of Reuben Burstein; the impresario looks like a man from home. She heard his big, burnished voice, and like a small mark on a cheek, like a tilt in the little finger of a hand injured a long time ago, the tilt and the injury both forgotten, underneath she heard Yiddish.
Lillian moves. She presses close to Reuben Burstein and says, “My name is Lillian Leyb. I speak Yiddish very well, as you can hear, and I also speak Russian very well.” She digs her nails into her palms and switches into Russian. “If you prefer it. My English is coming along.” She adds in Yiddish, “Az me muz, ken men,” which is “When one must, one can.” When Reuben Burstein smiles, she adds, “And I am fluent in sewing of every kind.”
The Bursteins look at her. Miss Morris, who did have a Lithuanian mother but was born right here on the Lower East Side and graduated from the eighth grade and speaks standard Brooklyn English, also looks at Lillian, without enthusiasm. The crowd of women look at her as if she has just hoisted up her skirt to her waist and shown her bare bottom to the world; it is just that vulgar, that embarrassing, that effective.
The elder Mr. Burstein moves closer to Lillian. “Bold,” he says and he holds her chin in his hand like he will kiss her on the mouth. “Bold. Bold is good.” He waves his other hand toward Miss Morris, who tells all the women to form groups of four, to make it easier for her to speak to them. There are immediately fifteen groups of four. Lillian loses sight of Judith. She feels like a dog leaping over the garden wall. She smiles up at Reuben Burstein; she smiles at Meyer Burstein; she smiles, for good measure, at Miss Morris. Lillian has endured the murder of her family, the loss of her daughter, Sophie, an ocean crossing like a death march, intimate life with strangers in her cousin Frieda’s two rooms, smelling of men and urine and fried food and uncertainty and need. Just so, she thinks, and she smiles at these three people, the new king and queen and prince of her life, as if she has just risen from a soft, high feather bed to enjoy an especially pretty morning.
Reuben Burstein says in Yiddish, “Come back tomorrow morning, clever pussycat.” Meyer Burstein says, “Really, miss, how is your English?” And Lillian says, very carefully, “I attend night classes.” She pauses and adds, “And they go very well, thank you.”
It had taken eight hours for Lillian to get from Ellis Island to the Battery Park of Manhattan and another four to find Cousin Frieda’s apartment building. She had read Cousin Frieda’s letter and the directions to Great Jones Street while she stood on three different lines in the Registry Room, while the doctor watched them all climb the stairs, looking for signs of lameness or bad hearts or feeblemindedness. (“You step lively,” a man had said to her on the crossing. “They don’t want no idiots in America. Also,” and he showed Lillian a card with writing on it, “if you see something that looks like this, scratch your right ear.” Lillian tried to memorize the shape of the letters. “What does it say?” “What do you think? It says, ‘Scratch your right ear.’ You do that, they think you can read English. My brother sent me this,” the man said and he put the card back in his pocket, like a man with money.)
They had room, Cousin Frieda’s letter had said, for family or dear friends. They had a little sewing business and could provide employment while people got on their feet. It was a great country, she wrote. Anyone could buy anything --- you didn’t have to be gentry. There was a list of things Frieda had bought recently: a sewing machine (on installment but she had it already), white flour in paper sacks, condensed milk, sweet as cream and didn’t go bad, Nestlé’s powdered cocoa for a treat in the evening, hairpins that matched her hair color exactly, very good stockings, only ten cents. They had things here that people in Turov couldn’t even imagine.
Lillian had walked through the last door, marked push to new york, and showed her letter to a man moving luggage onto the ferry. He smiled and shrugged. She held up the letter and the block-printed address a dozen times to faces that were blank, or worse than blank, knowing and dubious; she held it up, without much hope, to people who could not themselves read and pushed her aside as if she’d insulted them. She hadn’t imagined that in front of her new home, in her new country --- after the trolley cars and the men with signs on their fronts and their backs, the women in short skirts, the colored boys with chairs on their backs and pictures of shiny shoes around their necks, and a team, an old man in red pants working with a young girl with a red hat, selling shoelaces, fans, pencils, and salted twists of dough, which smelled so good, Lillian had to cover her mouth and swallow hard --- the first thing she would see when she finally got to Great Jones Street was a woman in her nightgown and a man’s overcoat, weeping. Lillian watched the woman open a folding chair and take a china plate from her pocket and hold it on her lap. People passed by and put a few coins in the plate.
Cousin Frieda had run down the stairs and hugged Lillian. “Dear little Lillian,” she said. “My home is your home.” Frieda was thirty. Lillian remembered her from a family wedding when Frieda took her into the woods and they picked wild raspberries until it was dark. Lillian watched the woman across the street, sitting stock-still in the chair, tears flowing down her face onto her large, loose breasts, dripping onto the plate with the coins.
“Eviction,” Frieda said. “You can’t pay, you can’t stay.” She said in Yiddish, “Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben.” It’s hard to make a living.
She wanted to make sure Lillian understood. She didn’t want Lillian to be frightened, she said, everything would work out fine between them, but Lillian should see, right away, how it’s nothing to go from having a home, which Lillian does now, with her cousin Frieda, to having no home at all, like the woman over there who was thrown out this morning. Lillian did see.
Frieda took Lillian by the hand and crossed the street. She put a penny in the plate and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lipkin.” Taking Lillian up the stairs to her apartment, Frieda said to Lillian, “Poor thing,” and she gestured over her shoulder to a small room filled with a bed and two wooden crates. “You share with Judith.”
The lesson of Mrs. Lipkin was not lost on Lillian, still holding everything she had in Yitzak Nirenberg’s leather satchel.
It’s always the same dream. She’s dead. She’s blind, too. All she can see is a bursting red inside her eyelids, as if she’s on her back in Turov’s farthest field on the brightest day in June, closing her eyes to the midday sun. The entire world, the trees, the birds, the chimneys, has disappeared; there’s nothing but a gently falling white sky, which becomes her bedsheet. A straw pokes through to her cheek and she brushes it away and feels dried blood on her face. She rubs her eyes and feels the strings of blood that were closing her lids. They roll down her cheeks and into her mouth, solid bits of blood, hard as peppercorns, softening on her tongue, and she spits them into her hand and her hands turn red.
She sees everything now, in all directions. The red floor. Her husband lying in the doorway, covered in blood so thick his nightshirt is black and stiff with it. There are things on the floor between them: her grandmother’s teapot in four pieces, the bucket, standing on its mouth, the cloth they hung for privacy. A hand. Her mother is lying on the floor, too, gutted like a chicken through her apron, which falls like a rough curtain on either side of her. Lillian stands naked in the red room and the color recedes, like the tide.
Her father lies at the front door, facedown, still holding his cleaver against the intruders. His own ax is deep in the back of his neck. Her daughter’s little bed is empty. Another hand is on the floor beside it, and she can see the thin gold line of Osip’s wedding band.
Lillian screams herself awake.
Judith says, “Bad dreams.”
Lillian nods her head and Judith says, sensibly and not unkindly, “You don’t have to tell me.”
And Lillian doesn’t tell her that she’d heard the men whisper beneath their bedroom window, that the walls of the house had been so thin in places, she heard a man cough on the other side of the wall and another man sigh and it seems to Lillian that she had stopped breathing. Little Sophie lay on her stomach, dreaming, sucking on the corner of the quilt. The men put their shoulders to the door, hard, and Lillian reached for Sophie. The walls rocked violently, holding on to the door, but it was an old house, old wood, old mud, all pitted with holes as long and thick as pencils, and plaster began to fall from around the door. The wall would give way in just a minute.
Excerpted from AWAY © Copyright 2008 by Amy Bloom. Reprinted with permission by Random House. All rights reserved.
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