Away

Away begs the question - as a mother, how far would you go to save your child? Lillian Leyb is a Russian widow, an orphan, and a mother who has lost her child to horrible violence during a Russian pogrom. As seemingly the only survivor of her family, she makes her way to America and it is in New York City where she tries to build a better life for herself as a seamstress in a theater company. When she hears that her four year old daughter might still be alive somewhere in Siberia, Lillian risks everything to get to her. She prostitutes her body, mind, and soul to get to Sophie. Lilian learns sex can be a weapon, a coping mechanism, but also her power and her comfort.
It is one thing to say Lillian traveled to Siberia from New York, but show more it is quite another to see a map of her arduous journey from Manhattan to Chicago, to Fargo, to Spokane, to Vancouver and Dawson. The miles stretch out in an impossible-to-fathom line from one coast to the other. show less

I don't know who should get more credit-Amy Bloom or the excellent audio book reader, Barbara Rosenblatt, but it was a good reading experience, regardless. I kept imagining Bloom as a painter, making brush strokes that swept me back and forth through time. Flashing back a few years or flashing forward a few decades, she framed the story of Lillian Leyb with the stories and fates of the other characters. I didn't always admire Lillian, but I usually understood her motivations. In a weird way, it reminded me of The Color Purple-near relentless hardship and suffering, but not as a cheap plot device or there for the sole purpose of being "literary". Even so, the author was very close to taking it too far for me near the end, and if the book show more had ended differently, this might have been more of a rant than review, but she struck a balance right when it was needed. show less

I'm sure there are plenty of summaries elsewhere. This is my favorite kind of novel. History made easy maybe. A woman's early 20th century journey from Russia to NYC and up from Seattle to the far reaches of Alaska (where, yes, we have drifted from verisimilitude to fantasy) is woven with an immense amount of research--though woven very lightly. There's always Lillian Leyb's fiber of determination and that deeply hidden tender spot. The descriptions of the Jewish theater father and son--likable and unlikable, recognizable.

Another reviewer here notes; "Her nonchalant manner of describing the most horrendous of human sufferings allows readers to move forward without feeling steamrolled." Yes, and just about everyone Lillian meets, show more especially the women, has suffered greatly. What are you going to do? Get into a pissing contest? All you can do is soldier on and assume life must improve. Most of them don't even reveal their great wound; Bloom tells us.

So along the way you learn about Yiddish theater in New York City, how a kept but presentable woman could just about pass there, how train smuggling worked, the nature of prostitution and crime in Seattle, women's clothing, weapons, seamstress work, a women's reform school close to Canada, Chinese & Native American and black women just getting by, the mechanics and landscape of walking up through Canada and Alaska.

Still left wondering, though: how crazy was it for her to think she could cross to Siberia? Was this often done? Would it have made more sense for her to try to take a ship from SF or Seattle to, say, Vladivostok?

Wish there was more about Stalin's Zionist utopia in Siberia, too. show less

Away is the story of Lillian Leyb, who leaves Russia after her family is slaughtered by gentiles, only to hear, once she is settling into life in New York City, that her daughter is still alive and was taken by neighbors to Siberia. Lillian thus begins a journey across North America, hoping to travel by boat to Russia by way of the Bering Strait. The need to find her daughter drives Lillian on her journey, and the rich details of the people and cultures she meets on her way drive the novel. Away is a feast of characterization, language, and story, and Bloom manages to create a slim epic through rich but restrained description. Not one detail is out of place, and everything Bloom tells the reader is necessary for understanding Lillian's show more story. Recommended. show less

‘“I’m shattered,” he says. “That’s the truth of it.” Shattered, Lillian thinks. Aren’t we all.’ Shattered people almost exclusively populate Amy Bloom’s luminous new novel Away. After her family is brutally murdered in a Russian pogrom and her small daughter disappears, Lillian Leyb flees to New York in the 1920s to try to piece together a new life for herself. Just as she is making the first tentative steps towards letting herself feel again, she discovers that her daughter may still be alive in Siberia. Thus begins Lillian’s quest to find her daughter and to restore her shattered self.

Bloom’s descriptive prose gives the reader a true sense of time and place, as we move from New York to Seattle to Alaska. show more Lillian touches on the lives of many memorable, quirky characters, like Gumdrop Brown, a petite black prostitute who caters to men interested in prepubescent girls; Chinky Chang, a young grifter with a soft spot for Lillian; and Reuben Burstein, a Yiddish theater mogul. While her time with them is short-lived, Bloom generously gives us a glimpse into each of their futures after Lillian has moved on.

Bloom’s roots as a short-story writer show—each of the transient characters has his or her own discrete story, with those stories stitched together by Lillian’s journey. As is the danger with quirky characters, their stories sometimes veer towards unbelievability, but Bloom’s sparkling prose and rich storytelling overcome this.

Away is not for the squeamish. Lillian is crushed by the weight of her love for those she’s lost, and for the most part is beyond caring what happens to her body and her soul. But, along with the destructive, Bloom celebrates the redemptive power of love. Those who are willing to take this journey with Lillian will be rewarded. show less

Despite some other readers' mixed reviews, I loved this book. All of the characters -- including the heroine, Lillian -- are flawed and yet sympathetic. Lillian does a lot of despicable things to get where she needs to go, but if she didn't, she would never have a chance. I loved how Bloom wraps up the rest of a character's life story when they exit the plot line. Her characters were so fascinating that I really wanted to know what happened to them. (Her end stories do not disappoint.)

All in all, this was not an easy book to read. But, it was still a wonderful book that I really enjoyed. The journey to that enjoyment was not necessarily easy. The novel is epic in scope and completely and utterly unique and memorable. But, it was not easy by any means. I found the prose to be challenging for some reason. At times so amazingly beautiful that I didn't want to stop reading and other times it felt jumpy and all over the place. That was a difficult dichotomy that I felt over and over throughout the reading of the novel. In many ways, it felt a bit like it was a number of short stories (similar to the way Olive Kitteridge is a novel of short stories) that wrapped around one single woman. Yet, there were moments that I was show more frustrated with Bloom's writing style. Yet, the novel was saved for me by the story and the characters. They were memorable and interesting and compelling. I'm stealing from another reviewer who said the following which totally encapsulates how I feel about this book - "almost all of the characters in Away are seriously flawed human beings, but she paints such vivid portraits of these characters' inner lives and complex pasts that I couldn't help but have sympathy for all of them and admire more than a few of them."I really enjoyed reading about the various places Bloom described in the novel such as 1920's New York, Seattle's skid row and the Canadian frontier. Amazing. And I loved how she used a series of 'peaks' into the future throughout the narrative, ultimately letting the reader see into the future and learn what happens to all of the characters we meet along the way. I thought this was a wonderful technique and really made me feel all the more invested in the novel.I really liked this book a lot but also felt it was hard to read at times. I struggled with the rating but ultimately feel that the book as a whole deserves 4 stars despite its flaws. show less