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Last update - 16:34 21/05/2008 Fiction I will survive By Rifka Dzodin Tags: fiction, amy bloom  Away, by Amy Bloom, Random House, 235 pages, $23 "Away" starts out with an intriguing assertion: "The best parties are made by people in trouble." Only the event that kicks off this book isn't really a party at all; it's more like an episode of "Survivor" set in 1920s New York, with 150 poor Jewish women as contestants. The prize? A sought-after position as a seamstress at a Jewish theater on the Lower East Side, a job that is generally believed to be some lucky gal's ticket out of the ghetto. In their desperation to break away, they women have come out in their Sunday best, some holding sparklers and other accoutrements intended to make them look deceivingly happy and carefree, though the only reason they've prettied themselves up is to escape the lifetime of ugly poverty that likely awaits 149 of them. Everyone in this book, from its somewhat inexplicably fearless heroine to its array of colorful supporting characters, is in trouble in one way or another, and the desperation to survive is the thread that unites them. The centerpiece of all this trouble is Lillian Leyb, a Russian Jew who flees to America in 1924, after her husband and both parents are killed in a pogrom. When Lillian arrives in New York, she is under the impression that her young child, Sophie, has suffered the same fate as well. But when she receives word that Sophie may indeed be alive, "Away" turns into a condensed but epic tale of pursuit and survival, as Lillian follows this possibly apocryphal piece information across the continent and then by foot to the bleakly isolated Alaskan wilderness. In this latest novel, her second, Bloom, a former psychotherapist whose short story collection "Come to Me" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993, has created a coy, sardonic fairytale, one that vacillates between the absurd and the hyper-realistic. And it seems to have done the trick for Bloom: "Away" is in its 10th printing, just some six months after publication. In addition to popular success the book has also garnered considerable critical acclaim: The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, as well as New York Times critic Janet Maslin were all among those who tapped "Away" as one of their favorites of 2007. For this reader, however, "Away" fell short of expectations. We first encounter the resolute Lillian during her first days in New York, as she becomes acclimated to the overwhelming New World, which, in Lillian's case, entails making herself attractive and useful to all the people who count. First, Lillian pushes her way into the seamstress position at the Goldfadn Theater thanks to a little old-fashioned chutzpa. Soon after assuming her post, Lillian is adopted as the arm candy/domestic servant of Meyer Burstein, the establishment's suspiciously genteel matinee idol, who expresses less sexual interest in Lillian than he might toward the kitchen sink. Not so his portly, aged father, Reuben, owner of the Goldfadn, who unabashedly assumes that he is entitled to a share in Lillian and her services. Lillian makes barely a peep in protest, and this is seemingly due to the archetypal "rich old man" charm with which Bloom has tried to endow Reuben. In due time, Lillian is visited by her cousin Raisele, newly arrived from the Old World. Oddly enough, it is Raisele who greets Lillian at her own door one day, dressed in her cousin's bathrobe and smelling of her bath oil, having broken the lock. She tells Lillian that she heard from the constable of their Russian town that Sophie actually survived the pogrom and was taken in by fellow townspeople who headed east, toward Siberia. Not knowing if what the opportunistic, young Raisele has said is based on fact or for a desire to take Lillian's enviable place in the immigrant community by sending her off on what is essentially a suicide mission, Lillian nonetheless makes a decision that will carry her through to the end of the book. She rejects logic and the pleadings of others, though she has little more than a rumor to go on, as she embarks on an against-all-odds journey in search of the only surviving member of her immediate family, in short, the only remnant of her former life. Along the way, Lillian meets a cast of quirky supporting characters who, although elaborately imagined and amusing, are often predictable in their quirkiness. In addition to Meyer and Reuben, there's Yaakov, the wise and prickly struggling artist whose calling card bittersweetly describes the services he provides: "Tailor, Actor, Playwright/Author of 'The Eyes of Love'/Pants pressed and altered." After Lillian departs New York, something Yaakov makes possible by helping to fund and arrange her trip, she is "taken care of" by a jolly Irish train porter, who allows Lillian to save on her train fare in exchange for a mere sexual favor. When she is beaten, robbed and left for dead after stepping off her final train, in Seattle, she is rescued by a no-nonsense black prostitute answering to the name of Gumdrop. Lillian's cuts and bruises seem to practically vanish in the bath Gumdrop draws for her, and in no time, she's getting to know Seattle's underbelly. Later, she does a spell in a benign slammer in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, where she takes the "when in Rome" approach, getting a tattoo on her hip, and taking a female lover, a Chinese-American grifter with the unfortunate name of Chinky Chang. Bloom presumably intended this array of quirky characters to serve as vehicles for helping us understand Lillian and her quest. Ironically, though, it is they who end up with vivid personalities, even as the heroine forever remains a stranger to us, as she reinvents herself time and again according to the story's situational demands. And because the author has not provided Lillian with any sort of core personality that remains with her from one situation to the next, Lillian becomes defined solely by her search, and the struggle for survival it entails. Awesome impact Even if one never really gets a feel for Lillian, Bloom practically hits us over the head with the awesome impact she has on her fellow characters. After a certain character has run his or her course through Lillian's journey, Bloom offers the reader a neat, little summary of life after Lillian. Yaacov loses the will to live; the grifter Chinky Chang opts for a slow, simple life with a Mormon boy whom she meets on the train; Gumdrop gets out of the game, converts to Judaism and becomes a regular at Hadassah luncheons. Lillian's struggle to find Sophie is as untenable as the character herself. Though it's not hard to believe that the search for one's child could motivate one to head off on such a treacherous trek as Lillian does, it does stretch credibility to imagine our heroine surviving her ordeal, which begins in the merciless streets of urban America and goes on to include an average of 20 miles a day in the "bright and terrible," as Bloom describes the snowy Alaskan terrain, as well as cutting down trees, and hunting, skinning and roasting porcupines while crossing it. Even allowing the author a healthy dose of literary license, one has a hard time believing in a heroine who could practically write a handbook on surviving in the wild on her first try. Bloom also jumps back and forth between a melodramatic narrative and one that is almost alarmingly casual, which makes the book, on the one hand, easy to get through -- not too heavy and not too light -- but on the other, one whose melodramatic elements are rendered in a manner all too restrained, and whose casual sense of irony is not biting enough to be really affecting. The result is a book that is pleasant but ultimately forgettable. "Away"'s saving graces are the rich language and apt observations with which Bloom has infused her prose. It is this that ultimately makes the novel so enjoyable, even if the plot is sometimes irksome and the human characterization often weak. Bloom tells this story in an exceptional narrative voice, full of vividly palpable descriptions and witty observations. She has a love affair with light and color. Describing the British Columbia forest, she writes: "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." But Bloom's real fascination is with lists, as well as parenthetical phrases that allow her to jam-pack her sentences with detail. As the men who accompany Lillian on the first leg of her journey in the Canadian wilderness chit-chat along the way, she, or rather Bloom, overhears, and we get to know exactly what's on their minds: "Every night the men talk about who died (Hank Boss, capsized in Kitselas Canyon; Little Jack Waller, on the Skeena; Gilbert McDonald, ptomaine poisoning up at Yukon Crossing) and who they want to f--- (Lillian Russell, says one of the old men; Bill Morrison's widow at Lower Laberge; the barmaid with big tits at Second Crossing)." There isn't all that much dialogue in the book, with much of the space occupied by such delineations of peripheral details. Perhaps this is meant to make Lillian's new encounters with American people and things more relatable, by putting the reader flat against the wealth of new sights and sounds with which Lillian is met. In a 2000 interview in the online literary magazine Identity Theory, Bloom told Robert Birnbaum that she had once bought back and put away a manuscript for a mystery novel that had already been cleared for publication by HarperCollins, because she didn't feel it was as good as she could make it. At times, while reading "Away," I wished she had held off in publishing it as well, anxious to know what sort of a novel this could have become and mourning its wasted potential. "Away" is by no means a bad book (Bloom's lush prose could render the worst story at least readable). It's even a fairly decent one. It's just a shame that it's not a better book. It could have been. Rifka Dzodin is assistant to the editor of Haaretz English Edition's weekly arts and entertainment supplement, The Guide. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fear of extinction The state of over 20 species of birds in Israel has worsened considerably. Taking advantage Jerusalem police probe possible gang rape of disabled woman.

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