Away
By Amy Bloom
Random House, 240 pages, $23.95
Lillian Leyb has flown out of the darkness of her Russian village, where the bloody axes, severed hands and cries of her tiny daughter surface mostly now at night in dreams of the pogrom that wiped out her family. With the loss of her husband, child and parents, Lillian’s ocean crossing from Turov to the Lower East Side of New York City in 1924 feels to her like a “death march,” the first step in the substitution of shtetl life for the new and unfamiliar surroundings of her cousin Frieda’s two rooms on Great Jones Street, a world “smelling of men and urine and fried food and uncertainty and need.”
In “Away,” her winning second novel, National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom opens up Lillian’s heart, her life and her early 20th Century world to reveal the immigrant’s instinct to pick oneself up and to “move like an ox, among Americans.” Lillian joins the throng of hopeful, awkward newcomers as they sashay down Essex Street on a Saturday night with their Old World shawls and Yiddish accents, reeking of bad luck and hungry to join the modern world.
Bloom’s 22-year-old widow, orphan and grieving mother is just desperate enough to make a new life for herself among the living: “She learns the language of a country that terrifies her so that she can dig deeper into it and make a safe hole for herself, because she has no other home.”
After only a few weeks in America, Lillian eases into her place as the mistress of the Jewish theater’s very own “Matinee Idol,” Meyer Burstein, who is beautiful like a “chestnut horse” but who prefers the illicit pleasures of blond gentlemen under cover of green brambled canopies in the park to the willing bodies of young women decked out in satin and lace. In a twisted variation on the “day sleepers” who slip into Lillian’s tenement bed on Great Jones Street when she rises at dawn, taking their turn to rest when their night shift is done, Lillian is also the mistress of Meyer’s gray-haired father, Reuben, the “Impresario of Second Avenue” and long-time owner of the Goldfadn and the Bartelstone theaters.
Embracing her good fortune in whatever surprising shape it may happen to take, Lillian obediently plays her part in the peculiar escapades of the father and his larger-than-life son, at least until her fortune appears to change once again and she sees the chance to trade her admittedly empty comforts (including the flat that Meyer has rented for her) for the chance to recover some of the cherished life she has lost.
Lillian’s cousin Raisele appears with the news that Lillian’s red-cheeked, blue-eyed daughter, Sophie, may be alive, scooped up by neighbors and taken north to Siberia in the chaos of “humans destroying one another like hurricanes through houses: babies torn to pieces or fed to dogs, streets piled with corpses and people on their way to being corpses, toddlers clinging to the hands of their dead mothers, and police officers looking away, poking a stick through promising debris.”
Lillian acts quickly. She leaves behind the red-and-pink flowered carpeting and green damask settee in the apartment that looks to her like a stage set for a romantic comedy (” ‘The Spring Flowers,’ she thinks. ‘The Maiden and the Mensch.’ “), dons a gently weathered overcoat with maps of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska carefully sewn into the lining and sets off for an epic journey across the world to find her daughter.
Bloom has elsewhere observed that there are two terrible things in life: “Love, and the lack of it.” In “Away,” Lillian carries both those weighty burdens with her always, for miles over the sea to America, across the country to Seattle and then up north to Canada and along the Yukon Telegraph Trail as she travels in pursuit of the “warm opaque inside of being alive and with Sophie” that threatens at each step to float away and elude a mother’s grasp.
Her love for her daughter, a ravenous and insatiable hunger (“Lillian’s veins are bleeding fire, her hands and feet rippling with it”) multiplies in intensity despite Bloom’s evenhanded acknowledgment that “it may not matter to a little girl in Siberia that the mother she cannot see and may not remember so well loves her so.” And yet it is Lillian’s battle to contain her overflowing heart and fill the gaping hole deep inside her that ultimately drives her forward and with full force into an unexpected new life.
Bloom’s two previous collections of short stories, “Come to Me” (1993) and “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You” (2000), and her first novel, “Love Invents Us” (1997), handily displayed her gift for narrative, for insinuating herself deep inside the stories of characters like Lillian without leaving those stories misshapen or compromised in the way a less-careful writer might do.
Some still link Bloom’s literary talents, particularly her insightfulness as a writer, to her earlier career as a practicing psychotherapist. But the combination of artistry and surgical precision in her prose, along with her ability to strike so deeply within the hearts of the characters she invents, suggest more than the lucky occasion of Bloom’s professional training. “Away” combines the strengths of Bloom’s short fiction with the rhythm and imaginative range of a good novel.
With a volume of “Bulfinch’s Mythology” (and a thesaurus) as her cherished companion in her odyssey across the world, Lillian might have discovered hidden in the back of her collection of beloved Greek and Roman tales an obscure version of the story of Ceres, the ancient goddess who is desperate to rescue her daughter Proserpina from the clutches of Pluto in the Underworld. In the version imagined for Lillian by Bloom’s narrator, a version that is a nuanced map of Lillian’s emotional self as she struggles to make sense of where she has been and where she may be headed, the devoted mother Ceres does not save the helpless Proserpina from danger; she does not shield her or, ultimately, protect herself from the larger world. Instead, the daughter joyously embraces the promise of the full sexual and emotional life embodied by her dark husband, and the mother, in turn, opens her heart just wide enough to permit the child she loves with such abandon to make her own way.
Like Ceres, Lillian must learn to embrace growth and change even as she appreciates the richness of the past that continues to shape her. A “map of pain” on which “each mark tells its story clearly,” Lillian’s body records an indelible history in the dull red line etched across her chest by the knife of a village man thirsty for Jewish blood and in the small oval of rough, ridged purple on her shoulder made long ago by an impatient Russian mother wielding a hot soup spoon.
But, like Bloom’s ancient mother-goddess, Lillian must learn to tell the story of her life in a new way, honoring the inner transformations of her epic journey, while also making peace with, and finding comfort in, the emptiness and loss that are for Bloom a fundamental part of the human condition.
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Laura Ciolkowski teaches literature at New York University.
