It is the mid-1920s, and the slaughter of Jews, known as the pogroms, rages in the Russian village of Turov as Lillian Leyb sends her 3-year-old daughter, Sophie, to the chicken coop to hide. Later, after finding the bloody corpses of her father, mother and husband, Leyb goes to retrieve Sophie and finds that the girl has vanished, leaving only little blue hair ribbons in the weeds. Is she dead or alive, and if alive, where is she?
The question shapes the plot and setting of Amy Bloom’s second novel, “Away.” It also drives the heroine, Lillian, as she takes a steamer from Russia to New York, then returns to Russia on foot: A difficult task but not without precedent.
Legend has it that a woman named Lillian Alling left Russia and came to New York in the 1920s, but after only a short time, Alling decided to walk home to Russia. Why she did so and how she got from New York to the West Coast isn’t clear, but evidence places her in British Columbia and Alaska where she seems to have followed a now-defunct telegraph line to Siberia.
Alling’s story inspired the Australian nonfiction writer, Cassandra Pybus, whose 2004 book, “The Woman Who Walked to Russia,” (which Bloom mentions in her acknowledgments) recounts what little is known of Alling’s trek in about 10 pages. It also inspired Bloom to write this fictionalized account of the legend.
Bloom, a National Book Award finalist for the story collection “Come to Me,” tells the story with evocative details, as in this description of Alaska: “The light falls in narrow green spears through the woods and spreads like a shining stain, a baleful white canopy, sheer and bright, in the open.” She adds motivation. She heightens tension with numerous flashbacks. She brings resonance – through allusions to mythology (specifically the myth of Ceres, who searches the underworld for her daughter, Prosperine) – and verisimilitude with references to the Soviet Zion launched in the late 1920s.
And she tells all through an omniscient narrator who knows what everyone is thinking as well as what will happen in the future, which ironically makes the tale seem even more real. The narrator also has an ear for language, especially that of Eastern European immigrants; an eye for poetry; an awareness of period details, as seen in New York sweatshops with its Lithuanian tailors and seamstresses. Above all, the narrator has a sense of life’s incongruities, which play out in everything from the story’s tone to its theme.
The novel begins as Leyb, hoping to rebuild her life after tragic loss, goes to New York. She works as a hat-maker, a seamstress and becomes the mistress of Reuben and Meyer Burstein, a father and his son, one a manager and the other a Broadway actor. All is well despite the logistics of living in a love nest visited by the father during the day and the son late at night. Then Leyb learns that Sophie might be alive.
That knowledge fuels the rest of the book, sending Leyb from New York City to Spokane, Wash., up the Telegraph Trail to British Columbia to Alaska, and finally to the edge of Siberia to locate her daughter. Along the way, she endures everything from head lice to mosquito swarms to kinky heterosexual and homosexual sex to blinding snow to the unwanted attention of a female prison warden. She also finds what seems like true love.
Colorful eccentrics help her survive and tell her their stories. They include Gumdrop Brown, a prostitute who dresses in smocks and pinafores in a style suggestive of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and who enlists Leyb’s help in a robbery and murder.
This novel is reminiscent of the Lewis Carroll tale. Like Alice, Leyb becomes a story collector. Leyb’s many stories, though, are not the fabric of a dream (as with Alice). Instead they provide relief to Leyb’s recurring nightmares in which her family is slaughtered and her daughter is lost. The nightmares add texture to what could be just a story of irony and sex.
This novel’s genius lies in its tone, which shines through even in some of its lengthy compound-complex sentences. With its dashes, parenthetical statements, and quick, breathless pace, this excerpt from a longer sentence feels more like a prose poem than a paragraph. Listen to Bloom’s unfailing rhythm:
“But Meyer is a wonderful Romeo, impetuous, tender, burning with passion, and there is even a wry cafe wit that Lillian is sure is Burstein, not Shakespeare (about which she is correct; the Bursteins have taken the best of Shakespeare, skipped over some dull pieces of business, formed Romeo from a boy in love – by its nature a joke to the Goldfadn audience – into a passionate full-grown man torn between duty and love which everyone understands).”
Bloom’s sense of irony is near perfect as is her tendency to turn aphorisms on their heads: ” … love is not the reason people act like fools – it is the excuse they use to act like fools,” observes one of the characters.
Stunning metaphors appear every few pages as in:
“Reuben frowns when Lillian approaches because if he didn’t, the smile would break across his face like dawn, color would flood his high, lined cheeks, and the whole world would know what so far only Yaakov knows.”
Ultimately, Bloom turns a skeleton of a story with a few paltry incidents, which may or may not be true, into a work of fiction that resonates like fact and contains the universal truths found in enduring literature. She does this primarily through bright writing and precise evocative details making the stuff of legend into the stuff of art, and proving that while truth may not be stranger than fiction, it can certainly inspire a compelling story.
Diane Scharper teaches English at Towson University. Her next book, “Reading Lips,” will be published next year.
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FICTION
Away
By Amy Bloom
$23.95
