NJ Jewish News on-line | Huck Finn as a stylish, sexy Jewish immigrant

by Sanford Pinsker
an emeritus professor at Franklin and Marshall College. He now lives in south Florida, where he writes about Jewish literature and culture on cloudy days.
11.01.07

Let me begin by simply stating the obvious: Amy Bloom is a first-rate writer who knows how to turn a delicious phrase, create unforgettable characters, and, most of all, plumb the depths of the human heart. Away, her fifth book, tells the epical story of Lillian Leyb, a survivor of a pogrom in Russia who finds herself alone and nearly penniless on New York's Lower East Side.

Bloom etches Lillian's hardscrabble world of 1924 with due attention to the details of that time and place, but research never overpowers a tale of survival told with nearly equal measures of resolution and wit.

"Az me muz, ken men" ("As I must, I can") becomes the novel's mantra as Lillian quickly moves from being a humble seamstress for a Yiddish theater company to becoming a mistress to not one but two Bursteins, a father-producer and his matinee idol (probably homosexual) son. Lillian soon finds herself in the lap of luxury as well as in, let us say, strained sexual circumstances.

Moreover, the Lower East Side shares space with Lillian's vivid memories of her murdered husband, father, and mother. Her dream is always the same one, chillingly captured in Bloom's exquisite prose:

"She's dead. She's blind, too. All she can see is a bursting red inside her eyelids, as if she's on her back in Turov's farthest field on the brightest day in June, closing her eyes to the midday sun. The entire world, the trees, the birds, the chimneys, has disappeared; there's nothing but a gently falling white sky, which becomes her bedsheet. A straw pokes through to her cheek and she brushes it away and feels dried blood on her face. She rubs her eyes and feels the strings of blood that were closing her lids. They roll down her cheeks and into her mouth, solid bits of blood, hard as peppercorns, softening on her tongue. And she spits them into her hand and her hand turns red."

One could quote dozens of passages that bubble over with the haunting power of words at the author's poetic best. But now to Lillian's affinities with Huck Finn. Both, I would suggest, are survivors who travel through tough spots on the wings of secular prayer and their wits. Huck makes his way down the mighty Mississip, while Lillian, after learning that her four-year-old daughter Sophie may have escaped the ravages of the Turov pogrom, sets off to Siberia, where the girl has presumably been taken.

Lillian's travels take her across America to Seattle, then to Alaska, and finally along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. Lillian, being Lillian, becomes the product of all the people she meets along the way — some good, some bad, some sexual partners, some good friends. At one point Lillian counts herself among those she calls "Smart Girls With Their Legs Wide Open." The description is as apt as it is sassy, for whatever else may be said about Lillian Leyb, she certainly has moxie.

But willful though she may be, Lillian never makes it to Siberia, and it is Bloom's narrative voice that relates her daughter's story of upward mobility in the new world of communist Russia. Sophie grows up as Tatiana Bugayenko, an "atheist, a Red Pioneer, when her father thinks the time is right." And Sophie's replacement father was dead right: It gives Sophie the chance to be first in her class in Vladivostok, picnicking in the botanical gardens with good-looking gentile boys who are only a little intimidated by her intelligence.

Sophie studies science ("It's hard to debate science," her father counsels), and in 1960 writes a poem that makes her a minor sensation. Lillian remains an avid reader all her life, including books of Russian poetry, but she never comes across Tatiana's poem. Such are the bittersweet ironies and wry sleights of hand that characterize Bloom's novel. Away is about the broad landscape of American opportunity and what a Huck-like heroine can make of it. As Bloom puts it, "Whatever it is like, Lillian doesn't care. She will be the flower, the slave, the pretty thing or the despised and necessary thing, as long as she is the thing chosen from among other things."

Away is as wide-ranging and raunchy as it is energetic and heartfelt. In short, this is a book about a Russian-Jewish immigrant like no other I have ever read. Run rather than walk to your nearest bookstore and come home with a copy. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

IT HAD TAKEN eight hours for Lillian to get from Ellis Island to the Battery Park of Manhattan and another four to find Cousin Frieda's apartment building. She had read Cousin Frieda's letter and the directions to Great Jones Street while she stood on three different lines in the Registry Room, while the doctor watched them all climb the stairs, looking for signs of lameness or bad hearts or feeblemindedness. ("You step lively," a man had said to her on the crossing. "They don't want no idiots in America. Also," and he showed Lillian a card with writing on it, "if you see something that looks like this, scratch your right ear." Lillian tried to memorize the shape of the letters. "What does it say?" "What do you think? It says 'Scratch your right ear.' You do that, they think you can read English. My brother sent me this," the man said and he put the card back in his pocket, like a man with money.)

They had room, Cousin Frieda's letter had said, for family or dear friends. They had a little sewing business and could provide employment while people got on their feet. It was a great country, she wrote. Anyone could buy anything — you didn't have to be gentry. There was a list of things Frieda had bought recently: a sewing machine (on installment, but she had it already), white flour in paper sacks, condensed milk, sweet as cream and didn't go bad, Nestle's powdered cocoa for a treat in the evening, hairpins that matched her hair color exactly, very good stockings, only ten cents. They had things here that people in Turov couldn't even imagine.

Lillian had walked through the last door, marked PUSH TO NEW YORK, and showed her letter to a man moving luggage onto the ferry. He smiled and shrugged. She held up the letter and the block-printed address a dozen times to faces that were blank or, worse than blank, knowing and dubious; she held it up, without much hope, to people who could not themselves read and pushed her aside as if she'd insulted them. She hadn't imagined that in front of her new home, in her new country — after the trolley cars and the men with signs on their fronts and their backs, the women in short skirts, the colored boys with chairs on their backs and pictures of shiny shoes around their necks, and a team, an old man in red pants working with a young girl with a red hat, selling shoelaces, fans, pencils, and salted twists of dough, which smelled so good, Lillian had to cover her mouth and swallow hard — the first thing she would see when she finally got to Great Jones Street was a woman in her nightgown and a man's overcoat, weeping.