With the same mesmerizing grace she brings to her award-winning short stories, Bloom's new novel sweeps the reader along from page one. The story begins in Russia in the 1920s. Lillian Leyb survives the massacre of her family and runs away to New York City to live with a cousin. Ever practical, she allows herself to become the mistress of a star of the Jewish theater, and although she's not happy, life is not so bad. However, when she finds out that her daughter Sophie may still be alive in Siberia, she leaves everything she has and begins the arduous journey home. She rides trains hiding in broom closets and servicing conductors. She climbs on boats and walks the Yukon trail headed for the Bering Strait and probably death. But she has to try. Full of pathos, humor, and often heartbreaking beauty, this novel tells the story of immigrant life and the caring of others without being maudlin or didactic. All characters are brilliantly and compellingly drawn.--Dickie, Elizabeth Copyright 2007 Booklist

Rosenblat, who has narrated hundreds of books over the past 15 years, has a deep, clear, engaging voice and a mastery of cadence and inflection that projects wit and nuanced meaning. Rosenblat is renowned for her proficiency with accents-an important skill for Bloom's fifth novel, which includes all sorts of wonderfully complex human beings: Reuben and Meyer Burstein, scions of the 1920s Lower East Side Yiddish theater; Midwestern WASPS; and Seattle's "colored" lumpen. Lillian Leyb, a 22-year-old Yiddish-speaking immigrant whose parents and husband were brutally slaughtered during a Russian pogrom, is searching for her missing three-year-old daughter, Sophie. In New York, Lillian hears that Sophie has been seen with a family in Siberia. With her dictionary, thesaurus and a map, she sets out on her journey across America. Bloom's graphic, often witty and erotic descriptions of Lillian's adventures include a blow job exchanged for a free ride in the broom closet of a train; her odd friendship with Gumdrop, a "colored" prostitute whose pimp they accidentally murder; and, finally, her moving redemption through care and love. Away is a remarkable saga best experienced through Rosenblat's masterly interpretation. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, June 18, 2003). (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

IT'S 1924, and Lillian Leyb, from Turov, Russia, has just made her way through Ellis Island to Manhattan. Life on the Lower East Side may be tough, but wily Lillian is prepared for it. When hungry, she steals what she thinks won't be noticed ("She borrows, is what she says to herself - she just borrows like crazy"). When she detects the faint Yiddish accent of a man hiring seamstresses for the Goldfadn Theater, she makes a move for the job. Never mind that she can't really sew, knows hardly any English and is elbowing aside a more-qualified friend. And when, later on, the man makes a move on her, she acquiesces - even though she has already become his son's mistress. Lillian will endure almost anything because nothing can be worse than what she has already survived - a pogrom in which her family was butchered: "She was 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." Lillian's grim plight and past are never far from the narrative of Amy Bloom's new novel. Every night, Lillian dreams of the bloody bodies of her parents and husband, and of the chicken coop where she'd ordered her daughter, Sophie, to hide. But Lillian persists. "Az me muz, ken men." When one must, one can. The first half of "Away" is a vivid immigrant tale, and Bloom (the author of a previous novel and two collections of short stories) nicely captures Lillian's everyday struggles - from battling that stubborn "v" in her English ("won't, not von't") to being a mistress twice over, scratching and clawing for a living she's not sure is worth it. Other moments are funny and surprisingly sweet: the almost erotic pleasure of Lillian's first taste of ice cream; the giddiness of whirling in a waltz with the wickedly funny, generous Yaakov Shimmelman (whose business card reads "Tailor, Actor, Playwright. Author of 'The Eyes of Love.' Pants pressed and altered"). But such small delights seem hollow to a heroine who can come across as hollow herself. Considering her horrific past, this is perhaps understandable. "'I am a waltzing cadaver,'" declares Yaakov, who has seen his own unendurable tragedies. "'You know.' And she does." In its second half, however, the novel takes off - when Lillian's cousin, Raisele, newly arrived from Russia, announces that Lillian's daughter is still alive. Unsure whether to believe her conniving cousin (who has broken into Lillian's apartment, donning her dressing gown and preparing to faint for dramatic effect), Lillian must take a chance on the possibility that she's telling the truth. Too poor to buy a ticket for a voyage back across the Atlantic, she appeals to Yaakov, who charts her a course across the United States - to Siberia by way of Alaska. With every passing mile, "Away" gains traction and steam. Lillian travels from New York to Chicago to Seattle, smuggled along in locked closets by not-always-kindly train porters, then takes the cheapest passage on a ship to Alaska and finally sets out on foot. As Lillian continues her journey, Bloom fills a vast canvas with brilliantly sketched characters. In Seattle, Lillian is rescued by a black prostitute with a trousseau of little girls' clothes and a keen mind for business. In Canada, she lands in a correctional institute and meets, among a crowd of misfits and miscreants, a marvelously rendered Chinese con woman. Even minor figures - a humble Mormon boy, a lady card shark - leave indelible marks. Yet Lillian is less well imagined. For all the insight that Bloom, herself a psychotherapist, gives her heroine, Lillian seems more like the subject of a respectful biography than a character built from the inside out. Her journey, rather than her personality, becomes the focus of the story. Lillian is defined by a single quality: her irreducible will. "It is so frail and delicate at night that she can't even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and binding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day." Bloom doesn't always flatter Lillian, but she's always in awe of her - and this leads to a few missteps. Bloom's desire to bring Lillian's extraordinary past into the present (and, indeed, the present tense) can be too urgent and portentous. ("It is always like this," the novel begins.) Dialogue is sometimes rendered without quotation marks, as if hedging its claim to reality. And occasionally Bloom's incantatory style is excessive. (When Raisele tells Lillian that her daughter is alive, "hawks and sparrows drop down from the blackened sky.") But such clumsy moments are far outnumbered by the elegant and surprising moves of Bloom's plot. Not least of these is her demonstration of how plausibly love is found in unexpected corners, for different reasons - and sometimes for no reason at all. Louisa Thomas has written for Slate, The New Yorker and other publications.

Imagine Homer's Odyssey set in 1924 New York City, with Odysseus a 22-year-old woman who escaped the Russian pogroms only to try to make her way back in search of the daughter she left behind. Lillian Leyb arrives at the home of her cousin Frieda to begin her new life in America. She meets Yiddish theater impresario Reuben Burstein, his actor son, Meyer, and Reuben's friend, Yaakov Shimmelman, and the three men are instrumental to her education. Lillian becomes romantically involved with both Burstein men, but when she learns that her daughter, Sophie, was spared the fate of her husband and parents, the fate that causes her constant nightmares, Lillian begins a trek west, across the United States to Canada and Alaska and finally to Siberia. Her encounters broaden to include other men, a Seattle prostitute and her pimp, and prospectors and line operators along the Telegraph Trail. In earthy, less-than-genteel language, Bloom (Normal) draws a picture of a no-longer-innocent abroad whose mother-love never diminishes despite the hardships she endures. Bloom reveals the fates of all those Lillian leaves behind, and this knowledge is satisfying, even as Lillian trudges onward. Recommended for large fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/07.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A Russian Jewish woman's struggles to survive in America, then recapture the past brutally stolen from her, are recorded with eloquent compression in this striking second novel from NBA nominee Bloom (Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, 2002, etc.). In a brisk narrative of the events of two crowded years (1924-26), we encounter immigrant Lillian Leyb working as a seamstress on New York's Lower East Side, and becoming mistress to both theater owner Reuben Burstein and his homosexual son Meyer (a popular matinee idol). Lillian's stoicism masks the terror that haunts her in recurring dreams--of the massacre of her family by "goyim" revenging themselves on Jews sharing the meager resources of their village (Turov) and of the reported subsequent death of her beloved daughter Sophie. When another relative newly arrived in America reports that Sophie lives (having been rescued by a family that moved on to Siberia), Lillian embarks on a complex pilgrimage that takes her to Seattle and points north. She survives being robbed and beaten, bonds with a resourceful black prostitute, is sent for her own safety to a women's work farm by the one man (widowed constable Arthur Gilpin) who seems not to have sexual designs on her, then makes her way across the Yukon to the Alaskan coast, encountering a refugee exiled following an accidental killing, John Bishop, who will be either her last best hope of finding Sophie or the alternative to a life of ceaseless wandering and suffering. Summary doesn't do justice to this compact epic's richness of episode and characterization, nor to the exemplary skill with which Bloom increases her story's resonance through dramatic foreshadowing of what lies ahead for her grifters and whores and romantic visionaries and stubborn, hard-bitten adventurers. Echoes of Ragtime, Cold Mountain and Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, in an amazingly dense, impressively original novel. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.