Amy Bloom, Away

What a treat, another novel from Amy Bloom. Her first Love Invents Us is one of my favorites.

This new one, Away, is completely different in everything but the art of writing, her playing with time.

Away begins in the novel’s present time, July 3, 1924, at an audition in the Goldfadn (Yiddish) Theatre. By a very brash and slightly unfair move, Lillian Leyb, thirty-five days in this country catches the approval of the theatre’s owner, Reuben Burnstein.

A blink of three pages later, readers find themselves in Russia during pogram. It’s her nightmare, and oh, so real:

She’s blind, too. All she can see is a bursting red inside her eyelids, as if she’s on her back in Turnov’s farthest field on the brightest day in June, closing her eyes to the midday sun.

What follows is a massacre that will haunt you, as though you were Lillian and it was happening to you.

A page later, readers are back in Brooklyn in the home of Lillian’s refuge, Aunt Frieda, learning that Lillian is prepared to do anything—anything!—to survive.

The peep in Yiddish theater life and just what anything entails is fascinating. So are the people Lillian moves among. Most fascinating is watching them manipulating, using, and loving each other all at once.

Just as it seems Lillian has survived, found a warm if tricky place for herself, she learns that her daughter, whom she believed not to have survived the massacre, is alive and being taken to Siberia.

Immediately she decides to return to Russia, go to Siberia, to Sophie. Her new family won’t help her. A friend challenges her reason for going:

“Because she belongs to you? Is that why?”

Lillian is horrified.

“No. Because I think they are not nice. Or maybe they are dead and there is no one to care for her. Because she a little, little girl. Not that she is mine. That I am hers.”

Can a Jewish immigrant, an all but penniless female, still a bit shy of English, who could barely navigate from Brooklyn to Manhattan, find her way across this continent, up to Alaska and across to Siberia to track down her daughter?

Finish the novel and discover.

In addition to details of the trek you’ll meet those Lillian encounters in her effort. Amy Blood was a fine short story writer before she became a novelist, and these meetings become short stories, little biographies, of the encountered. Her father had claimed for her that she was lucky, but she wasn’t lucky on this trip; nothing you read will make you long to follow in her footsteps, reading about them is painful enough.

But the characters emerge in living color. Amy Bloom, a psychotherapist when she isn’t writing or teaching writing, sees people keenly and sees through people. And the action scenes are fast paced and breath-tasking.

This novel allows you to test whether your particular taste is for action or intimacy in fiction. The New York Times’ book reviewer Louisa Thomas, wrote of it, “In its second half, however, it takes off…. With every passing mile, “Away” (sic, newspaper style) gains traction.” But I found myself muttering, “Enough!” I wanted one less terrible character and much more of Lillian’s reaction to whom she met and what she slogged through. These scenes felt announced by a very good sportscaster. I’d lost my closeness to Lillian, and she, after all, was what the novel was all about.

I’m hungry for your reaction; please read the novel and give me your take.