In the big screen it has become a gaslit fantasy, more fabulous than filthy, but New York’s Lower East Side in the 1920s was a dangerous, fearful place—especially for the millions of immigrants who came fleeing everything from pogroms to the plague.
“I know there is a church on a certain street to my left,” says a character in Henry Roth’s classic novel of the time, Call it Sleep. “The vegetable market is to my right. ... Within this pale is my America, and if I ventured further I should be lost.”
How many turned around and went home? Here is the question that kicks off Amy Bloom’s amazing new novel, Away. The book gathers the themes of her previous three works of award-winning fiction—loss, love and the gouge of family life—and spins a magnificent, transcendent work of the imagination. It is the first must-read novel of the fall.
Our heroine is Lilian Leyb, a Russian Jew who witnesses her entire family murdered one night by gentile neighbors in a pogrom. At 22 “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.” On the advice of a greedy aunt, who always coveted her family’s home, Lilian journeys to New York to ply her trade as a seamstress.
Being a woman, and a not-bad-looking one at that, Lilian winds up plying much more when she falls in with the Bursteins, two Yiddish theater impresarios. Bloom brilliantly resurrects their fabulous world, where velvet-suited gangsters who had trouble with their W’s underwrote 30 or 40 playhouses that played to packed crowds every night.
Bloom never loses sight of the human drama at the center of this thronging city—putting a unique but not at all unlikely spin on Lilian’s arrangement. The handsome, swivel-hipped actor’s son she is living with is more interested in men, so on nights he doesn’t show up, Lilian keeps her bed warm for his father, Meyer. An unlikely love affair develops that catches both off-guard.
Away is full of moments like this, when the undead souls of recent immigrants reignite—performing their will to do more than survive. One of Meyer’s close friends, Yaakov, a hallow-faced tailor and some-time librettist, takes a shine to Lilian and watches over her as she navigates her way through the new world and this new relationship. “She is not dead, she is not what Yaakov likes to call ‘corpsy.’ She is just sensible.”
All of this feverish accommodation comes to a screeching halt when a cousin shows up at Lilian’s love pad claiming that Lilian’s daughter, Sophie, in fact survived the killing and is alive in Siberia. It is a dagger of a fact. Lilian has no choice—she must go, and Away suddenly gears up to traverse in reverse the journey from New World to Old.
Bloom has always been an economical writer—more attuned to characters’ lives than the backdrop they unfold against. In Away, however, she manages to do both, describing the trip Lilian takes across America, up into Canada, and toward the Bering Straight, where she hopes to sail to Siberia and her undead daughter.
Along the way Lilian meets a host of characters who, like her, are chasing opportunity into this new world, not finding it. In Dickensian fashion, Bloom breathes them to life in just a few pages—a prostitute named Gumdrop; a train conductor named Red McCann, who smuggles her from Chicago into the West; a frontiersman on the run from his past.
Away is a short novel, but it feels stuffed with fully realized characters, with America, with all the things that don’t fit inside the vessel we’ve taken to calling the American Dream. In Lilian, Bloom gives us an unforgettable woman who had that coveted prize in her hands and handed it back.
“She is a gnat,” Bloom writes, as Lilian presses north toward a dream less likely to be realized, “and what had been her whole world is no more than a small junk pile, old boots and body parts, an overturned basket in the middle of the world’s thoroughfare.” How easily such bad luck can feel like cruelty, this book reminds us—and how hard the brave will work to turn it around.
Away
Amy Bloom
*****
Random House, $23.95