Away

Lillian Leyb is a young Jewish woman whose entire family is murdered before her eyes in a Russian pogrom in the early part of the twentieth century.

She flees to America to begin a new life, only to receive news of her daughter’s possible survival in Stalin’s newly-established Jewish autonomous state. Faced with this information, she cannot choose but to embark on another arduous and life-threatening journey, this time across America to Siberia.

In many ways the archetypal Jewish immigrant, Lillian is tough and adaptable, prepared to do anything to make her way in the New World, but also a traumatised survivor haunted by memories of the life she was torn from. Unwilling to become another woman crying for her lost family on the streets of New York, but unable to let go of the past completely and remake herself in an American mould (as, for example, her cousin Raisele does), Lillian exists somewhere in between the two extremes.

It’s this space that makes the wide sweep as well as the emotional nuances of Bloom’s novel possible – that Lillian’s epic journey can co-exist with the quieter moments of reflection and longing – and which makes it such a satisfying read. Few words are wasted, but it’s not a sparse narrative. Rather, Bloom’s ability to conjure personality and emotion with a few choice words and phrases enables her to cram the novel with incident and character.

Although her story moves at a vigorous pace, Bloom also has some lovely turns of phrase that are worth pausing over: a woman’s laugh is ‘the sound of bells on a warhorse’; an awkward courtship suffers under the glare of daylight, which ‘peels us like fruit’. And although we are not with any character save Lillian for long, Bloom has the gift of making them vividly present within a few short chapters.

Lillian’s encounters with others as she travels through an increasingly harsh landscape become absolutely crucial as the novel plots its parallel emotional and psychological course., Finding herself slowly transformed from her ‘dead American self’, the novel’s ambiguous title casts a growing shadow over Lillian. Quite what she has been moving away from - or what has moved away from her - isn’t truly made clear until the closing pages, in which Bloom allows her weary wanderer a sweetly satisfying resolution.