Review
How do you make a dazzling,
compulsively readable novel out of such a tragic story? While a first glance at
the dust jacket suggests a laborious, dirge-like read, Amy Bloom immediately
takes the reader by the shoulders and spins him or her about-face from the very
first page. Her style is immediate, arresting, and finely-tuned. Her sentences
nail it every time, the details and tone are spot-on, and the results are by
turns energizing and devastating.
As the title suggests,
Away is a story of leaving. Over and over again,
Lillian leaves people and places in search of a home that might not exist. Those
who offer her help, lodging or work, both honorable and terrible, appear as
bright flashes in a darkened room, their images burned in the reader's mind long
after they've disappeared. As Lillian leaves each character behind, Bloom spins
out a brief,...
Beyond the Book
Yiddish Theatre in America
(Away opens with Lillian arriving in New York in
1924, where she quickly finds a job as a seamstress for a famous Yiddish
theatre, and becomes the mistress of its star actor.)
More than 200 Yiddish theatre troupes performed in the
United States between 1890 and 1940 (photo
of a
theater group in 1909). In their heyday in the 1920s, twelve
troupes resided in New York City alone, with 22 Yiddish theatres on the Lower
East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Their repertoires spanned a variety of
genres including operetta, musical comedy, revues, melodrama and Yiddish
adaptations of Shakespeare. Audiences came to laugh and be entertained, but a
vibrant literary culture also led to adaptations of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and...
