Los Angeles – Amy Bloom might be the most unlikely opponent of whining you ever meet.
Before she made a name as a writer of short stories, the quick-to-laugh Bloom spent 20 years working as a psychotherapist.
As dedicated as she is to the talking cure, 54-year-old Bloom has no patience for stories about sad sacks. “It’s only in the modern world that you get points for being a victim,” says Bloom, sitting at a diner in West Hollywood, where she has been living the past few months, working on a new television series.
“Away” puts the notion of victimhood into context. The novel opens after its Jewish heroine, Lillian Leyb, watches her family murdered one night by Gentile neighbors during a Russian pogrom. At 22, Lillian was made “an orphan, a widow, and the mother of a dead child, for which there’s not even a special word, it’s such a terrible thing,” Bloom writes.
On the advice of a greedy aunt who has coveted the family home, Lillian travels to New York in 1924 to work as a seamstress. Being a woman, and not bad-looking, she falls in with the Bursteins, two Yiddish theater impresarios who have trouble pronouncing their “w’s” and a somewhat sinister role in Lower East Side nightlife. The story eventually traverses the United States through the black community in Seattle to the Alaskan wilderness.
Bloom grew up in Brooklyn long after most of New York’s Yiddish theaters had closed. Still, she saw flickers of that fabulous cultural environment. “My sister and I would be called on to attend these Sunday soirees to come pass around hors d’oeuvres to a lot of short, barrel-chested men with velvet fedoras.”
As much as she misses that world, Bloom hasn’t set out to sentimentalize it. Lillian is used by the Bursteins and uses them in turn. Bloom has already received one note from a reader criticizing her for making Lillian a calculating mistress. “What was she going to do?” says Bloom. “She was a woman in that time.”
Bloom began writing in the late 1980s and early ’90s and never expected much to come of it. When she was told her first book, “Come to Me,” was a finalist for the National Book Award, she didn’t even know what it was. Her second book of stories, “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You,” was a National Book Critics Circle finalist.
“Away” is her second novel, but the first to require extensive research.
She dove into it feet first, poring over descriptions of train journeys of the time, and reading sentimental Fannie Hurst novels set on the Lower East Side. One of the key influences on the book was a memoir by her grandfather, which her father had translated from the Yiddish. “He (the grandfather) was a socialist who had a conversion to capitalism when he came to this country,” Bloom jokes. “He saw the smokestacks and thought, ‘What a wonderful country!”‘
Bloom is fascinated by this ability to change and adapt, which she believes is still largely unexamined in fiction, despite so much immigrant fiction. “There are people I know who have suffered tremendous loss, and they get up every day and love their children and make jokes. As my father used to say to me, you’re smart, but better lucky than smart.”
Throughout Bloom’s writing career, such luck seems to have buoyed her.
Not long ago she was approached by producers who liked her writing and wanted to know if she had any ideas for a TV series. She came back with a proposal for a show about five therapists and their tumultuous private lives. The project got the green light and a hefty cast – including Lili Taylor and Derek Riddell, and premiered this summer on the Lifetime cable network as “State of Mind.”
Bloom, who studied theater and was trained as an actor, enjoys the collaborative work and the speed with which it is completed and released. Sometimes lines she writes are acted, shot and then broadcast within as little as 16 hours.
Although “State of Mind” is pitched as an inside look at psychotherapy, Bloom says it’s not altogether realistic. “I don’t think it’d be very interesting,” she says, “for anyone to watch real therapy being done: long silences and occasionally somebody blinks twice.”
The show is set in New Haven, Conn., at a clinic, not far from where Bloom actually used to practice. The forcefully direct speeches of the main character (Taylor) is based on her own experience. “This is the kind of couples therapist I am: You certainly might like to go to somebody nicer and more agreeable and more opinionated.’ So I have said to people: ‘If I were married to either one of you, I’d hang myself in the garage.”‘
Bloom is soon to marry an architect, after which she will set off on a book tour to promote “Away.” But first, she has to get through a summer of the TV grind in L.A. She won’t be complaining, though.
“People say living here is hell.” she notes, casting an eye outdoors at the sun already beating down at 8:30 a.m.
“Well, I’m not such a delicate flower.”
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
