Away: A Novel [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: Amy Bloom, Arthur Gilpin, Reuben Burstein (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Life is no party for Lillian Leyb, the 22-year-old Jewish immigrant protagonist of Bloom's outstanding fifth novel: her husband and parents were killed in a Russian pogrom, and the same violent episode separated her from her three-year-old daughter, Sophie. Arriving in New York in 1924, Lillian dreams of Sophie, and after five weeks in America, barely speaking English, she outmaneuvers a line of applicants for a seamstress job at the Goldfadn Yiddish Theatre, where she becomes the mistress of both handsome lead actor Meyer Burstein and his very connected father, Reuben. Her only friend in New York, tailor/actor/playwright Yaakov Shimmelman, gives her a thesaurus and coaches her on American culture. In a last, loving, gesture, Yaakov secures Lillian passage out of New York to begin her quest to find Sophie. The journey—through Chicago by train, into Seattle's African-American underworld and across the Alaskan wilderness—elevates Bloom's novel from familiar immigrant chronicle to sweeping saga of endurance and rebirth. Encompassing prison, prostitution and poetry, Yiddish humor and Yukon settings, Bloom's tale offers linguistic twists, startling imagery, sharp wit and a compelling vision of the past. Bloom has created an extraordinary range of characters, settings and emotions. Absolutely stunning. (Aug.)
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From The Washington Post

Review by Ron Charles

Amy Bloom knows the urgency of love. As a practicing psychotherapist, she must have heard that urgency in her patients' stories, and in 1993 when she broke onto the literary scene with Come To Me, we heard it in hers. She has never strayed from that theme. Four years later, she published Love Invents Us and followed that with another collection in 2000, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bloom writes with extraordinary care about people caught in emotional and physical crosswinds: desires they can't satisfy, illnesses they can't survive, and -- always -- love that exceeds the boundaries of this world. It's the kind of humid, overwrought territory where you'd expect to find pathos and melodrama growing like mold, but none of that can survive the blazing light of her wisdom and humor.

Now, with her aptly named second novel, Away, Bloom has stepped confidently into America's past to work in that old and ever-expanding genre of immigrant lit. It seems, at first, a familiar tune, but she plays it with lots of brio and erotic charge. Lillian Leyb is a desperate young woman, fresh off the boat, trying to make her way in New York during the mid-1920s. Like thousands of other Jews, she has fled the pogroms in Russia with no money, few skills and little English; she rents half a mattress in a crowded flat and competes for sewing jobs with other desperate young women. As potential employers survey the crowd, she pushes to the front:

"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."

Throughout this breathless story, Bloom blends her voice with her heroine's to create a deeply sympathetic narrative that's analytical but always inflected with Lillian's fervor. "She's burning up to learn English," the narrator notes, and after she gets hold of a dictionary and a thesaurus, her thoughts are filled (packed, engorged, crammed, infused) with parenthetical lists of synonyms. No effort is too much. If the boss demands some intimacies in exchange for a place to live, she'll pay up. If his gay son needs her to pretend to be his mistress, well, she'll do that too.

The varied expressions of desire never shock Lillian, a quality of tolerance that she shares with Bloom. In 2002, the author published a nonfiction book called Normal that examined the lives of transsexuals, cross-dressers and people with ambiguous genitalia. Away demonstrates that same compassionate interest in the broad spectrum of humanity, particularly all those people excluded from what we like to pretend is "normal."

Not a drop of self-pity falls in these pages. Instead, Bloom and Lillian seem to sigh over these men and women with their fragile egos and the ordinary needs that they consider illicit. At 22, Lillian has already survived so much that the humiliations and deprivations of New York are merely minor inconveniences: "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."

That breezy summary of horrors practically acknowledges that these are well-worn elements of an all too common tragedy, but Bloom knows how to keep her story surging with fresh energy. Just as Lillian attains some precarious comfort, Bloom turns this story of coming to America on its head: Cousin Raisele, presumed dead with the rest of the family back in Russia, shows up at the door and announces that she saw Lillian's 3-year-old daughter alive before she left.

"Sophie's name, the sound of it in Raisele's mouth, her name said by someone who had seen her, seen her laughing and chasing the chickens, seen her in her flannel nightgown and thick socks, braids one up, one down, seen her running in the yard. . . . Sophie's name is a match to dry wood."

In fact, this whole novel reads like dry wood bursting into flame:

desperate and impassioned, erotic and moving -- absolutely hypnotic. Once Lillian hears that Sophie may be alive, her only ambition is to leave America and find her daughter in Siberia. The old immigrant tale suddenly becomes a wild emigrant adventure.

It's an impossible quest, of course, and everyone tells her she's "doomed, foolish, and peculiar." Her cousin is probably mistaken -- or lying (she wants Lillian's job and her sugar daddy). Her best friend, an old tailor who loves her deeply, can't understand why she would give up everything she has in America for such a hopeless cause as her lost daughter. "Because she belongs to you?" he asks. "Is that why?" "No," Lillian answers. "Not that she is mine. That I am hers."

Because travel over the Atlantic Ocean and the European continent is impossibly expensive, a friend concocts a crazy plan to send her across North America, over the Bering Strait and then directly into the Soviet Union. He's underestimated her itinerary by about 3,000 miles, but none of this matters. "The fact is that however far it is from one place to the other, and however difficult it will be, they both know she must go."

And so she goes and goes and goes, with maps of the Pacific Northwest sewn inside the lining of her overcoat. It's a grueling journey that begins with a 22-hour train ride to Chicago in a locked broom closet. But that turns out to be the easiest of the trials Bloom throws in Lillian's path. Along the way, she's beaten, robbed, jailed and enslaved -- a whole catalogue of exploitation, from one side of America to the other as she soldiers on by train, steamship, mule, canoe and foot. No matter how little she has, everybody wants something from her, and it's usually sex. Yet nothing angers Lillian or derails her. Bloom has boiled this woman down to a single, inexorable desire, and Lillian expects no better from anyone else:

"That people are ruled by their wants seems a reliable truth." She wastes no time fuming about that truth or wishing it were otherwise.

Indeed, nobody wastes any time in this novel, particularly the author. The whole saga hurtles along, a rush of horrible, remarkable ordeals: One minute Lillian is jumping into a deadly ménage à trois, the next she's beating a porcupine to death with her shoe and eating it. Not every woman could pull that off. Each chapter reads like a compressed novel, a form that works only because Bloom can establish new characters and grab our sympathies so quickly.

One of her most striking techniques is the way she periodically lets little tendrils of the story push ahead, shooting into the future to spin out the stories of characters Lillian encounters along the way. Lives bloom or wither in these asides, and then we're back with Lillian once more as she trudges on, inexorably, toward her daughter. And so what begins as a paean to the immigrant spirit in a city of millions is ultimately a gasp of wonder at the persistence of love, even in the remotest spot on earth. Hang on.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063566
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063567
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (134 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #204,105 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful beginning and end, problematic middle, September 16, 2007

By	A Reader (Oregon) - See all my reviews

I loved the beginning of this book. I loved its faint Yiddish inflections, the bravery of its main character, the world Amy Bloom places her in, the sadness driving her. But then my heart started to sink as I realized she was going to keep Lillian going, on a Homeric journey, meeting one character after another like an odyssey, never staying in one place very long, rushing too quickly forward, and giving each new character an aria about their lost love. While reading the first 50 pages, I wrote emails to friends and family telling everyone to rush to buy this...then wrote back to say never mind. Then she won me back in the last 40 pages or so. There were things I really admired in the writing and things that didn't work at all -- I'm surprised an editor didn't give Bloom better advice, particularly about the sexual element that so oddly (and off-puttingly, often) appears in every experience, and also about the way she runs off with characters instead of sticking to the point. Every character is different, but each has such similar stories to tell that I found them uninteresting (and unreal) very quickly. It's hard to tell, too, if Bloom, meant to leave the inflection behind once Lillian leaves New York, or if the writer simply lost her way. It seemed like a glaring mistake to me (if Lillian has learned the English language on her travels, if that were made clear, maybe the loss of the inflected narration would have made more sense). Still, I found chunks of this to be a page-turner and moving. But to link these adventures together into a novel doesn't hide the fact that Bloom really is a short story writer. All in all, this doesn't satisfy as a novel, though I have high regard for a lot in it.

71 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Transport Yourself into the Brain and Life of a 22 year old Russian Immigrant., September 8, 2007

By	Doug "dcb" (Holladay, Ut United States) - See all my reviews

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Rather than review, I'm going to make my observations:

1. The book transported me into the life and brain of a 22 year old Russian girl who had to flee Russia to America in the 1920s. She has lived through the slaughter of her family and arrives in NYC without anything but the dress she's wearing. The author does a great job of putting you into the girl's shoes and you feel numb, desperate, your survival instincts kick in and you become ready to do what it takes to survive. Some of these things aren't what you learned to do in church, and yet they must be done.

2. The book is full of fringe characters who live and barely survive in the time. She works as a seamstress, lives with cousins, sleeps on a couch, the floor, out in the wilderness, on a cot in jail, etc., over half the book. She meets prostitutes, men running away from the law, robbers, becomes friends with a gay man, spends time in a woman's correctional facility, etc. Overall, I felt that all of these characters seemed real for the time and you really are experiencing the world of the 1920s both in NYC and Alaska.

3. There were very frank and straight forward sexual experiences along the way. The feeling that it creates is that sex was almost less complicated and straight forward then than it is now. But we're a young, inexperienced girl from Russia who is desperate, has been married and likes men. So she is very submissive and doesn't worry too much about it when approached by men she likes. I've read that these scenes were a negative by some of the other reviewers. I would say that if you can handle an R rated movie, you can handle this and that for me, it added a human dimension that made you love and understand the main character, Lillian, very well. You have extreme sympathy for her and just shake your head at what she goes through and yet still moves positively ahead.

4. From time to time the author moves us away from our main character to tell the rest of the story of the life of one of the other main characters. It is a very satisfying, dot the i's, cross the t's experience. Each sub story finishes up within a few pages and yet we have this very fun synopsis of their life that makes us smile and doesn't leave us hanging like happens very often in this kind of book. Whatever happened to old so and so?

5. Many books have an obvious ending that we're planning on experiencing as we're moving forward. Although you will formulate a similar plan here, you will find that your plan won't be realized. And yet the ending is very satisfying as we zoom away from the main character and we have closure by the end of the book, even though the main goal of the main character is never satisfied. We're left with the feeling that life is really a series of coincidences that happen along the way and that your life, as much as you want to plan it out, is really more your ability to handle things as they happen, make adjustments and then be happy with what is given to you. Humans are resilient and capable of going through a lot of extreme situations and can still survive and even thrive.

6. Lillian has trudged on foot, boat, ship, train from NYC all the way through Alaska and up to Siberia to find her little lost daughter who may be still alive or more likely dead. But human instinct, that she-bear instinct, makes us do amazing and perhaps, stupid things. And yet the book is touching, wonderful and real. You have to wonder if some of the things she goes through could have really happened, and yet, you realize, deep down, that they did happen, as horrible as they seem from our protected, pampered perspective.

If you're a little squeamish about reality, sex, etc., perhaps you shouldn't read this book. But you'd be missing a very insightful and wonderful experience.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Amy Bloom's novel Away left me with mixed feelings..., September 30, 2007

By	Mary B. Martin "engfish" (WV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I really enjoyed the beginning of the book...until she left on her journey to find her daughter...then the character faded somewhat into an unrealistic adventure...then the work picked up at the end. I think Bloom has a wonderfully vivid style, and effective characters, but the character's search for her daughter just did not seem too plausible after awhile, and, yet, some of the scenes were so well drawn. Perhaps the protagonist should have stayed in New York or Seattle; I don't know, but I wanted more of her, and yet the end did satisfy me. I am now reading her short stories and find them to be quite good.