‘Away’ tells immigrant’s tale of determination
“Away,”
by Amy Bloom (Random House, 240 pages, $23.95)
Once in a great while, a work of art – a poem, a painting, a book – will register in the chest cavity, producing an ache of recognition and pleasure.
“Away” by Amy Bloom is such a book. This immigrant tale springs from the same scorched earth of Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers” – the steppes of Russia and the pogroms that wrenched Eastern European Jews away from their communities.
Bloom’s novel, which begins in the Manhattan tenements of July 1924, is earthier and riskier than Howe’s work.
She tells the story of Lillian Leyb from Turov, who has “fine eyes and pretty ankles” and a “worldview, which is on the dark side … like any sensible person’s.”
We find out, through the filter of a nightmare, that she already has lost one family to Russian marauders when she pushes forward at the Goldfadn Theater to feign her way into a sewing job.
The father and son in charge are pleased by her boldness; the waiting 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.”
When an unreliable cousin, who has perfected the art of fainting, shows up to announce that Lillian’s 3-year-old daughter – assumed dead near the chicken coop – might be alive, Lillian determines to return to Russia. She starts west, planning to find Alaska and cross into Siberia.
Bloom, a former National Book Award finalist, moves this story like a slide rule, with a beautiful, old-fashioned precision, and the reader must work to keep up.
Beaten and robbed in Seattle, Lillian comes to as a prostitute known as Gumdrop kicks her into consciousness: “Get up now,” she whispers. “In about two minutes, they’ll have the clothes off your back.”
Sex saturates this novel, and so do its consequences. In just a few sentences, Bloom renders furtive homosexuality in Central Park, circa 1924:
“Instead of perfume and the faint trail of musk or vanilla or cinnamon you get off a woman, it’s the scent of his new leather belt and his cotton drawers and the smell of him and there you have it. It’s the thing that ruins Meyer’s life, it is like a lion stalking his mother’s house, that smell. Warm skin and grass and that close, thick scent, onion, salt, animal.”
Eventually, Lillian does reach Alaska, where mosquitoes are big enough to cast their own shadows, and she is spent down into near-nothingness, “a gnat, and what has 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.”
Alaska is where Michael Chabon set his alternative Jewish history, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” But where Chabon strains, Bloom seduces, generously letting us learn the fates of all her main characters before reaching her rich conclusion in a final chapter titled “One Brief Life.”
It’s a surprising, tough and incandescent book, one in which period details shine like the diamante buckles on the women’s shoes.
In this world, to misplace a sock means a day of bleeding at the back of the heel, and to taste ice cream or creamed spinach for the first time is to enter a new realm.