AWAY
By Amy Bloom
Granta Books/Paperback/
240 pages/$33 (without GST)/ Major bookstores/****

AMERICAN author Amy Bloom's second novel, Away, truly deserves the description 'bittersweet' as it somehow manages to leave you wondering whether you feel more depressed or uplifted.

It is 1924, and Lillian Leyb, a young Jewish woman from Turov, Russia, is the sole survivor of a pogrom that sees the slaughter of her father, her husband and, she believes, her daughter, Sophie.

'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,' writes Bloom, in a typically understated, yet devastating, sentence.

Desperate to find a new life, Lillian leaves for New York City. Despite having few skills and even less English, she soon manages to find relatively cushy work as a seamstress at a renowned Yiddish theatre, due to a combination of guts and desperation and a willingness, born of practicality, to become the mistress of a powerful theatrical father-and-son pair.

Bloom captures the numerous hardships Lillian undergoes in prose that is almost too beautiful for the ugliness it describes. Take Lillian's recurring nightmares about the massacre of her family, endowed with a savage, sensuous beauty: '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 hands turn red.'

But what seems set to be another tale about Jewish immigrants in pre-war New York is turned on its head when a cousin of Lillian's turns up with the news that Sophie is alive, adopted by another Jewish family who survived the pogrom and moved to Siberia.

Clinging to this thin shred of hope, as well as several maps stolen from the New York Public Library, she embarks on a quixotic cross-country trip, determined to make it to Siberia via Alaska.

The desire for closure is a propelling force throughout the book, and even as Lillian embarks on her own foolhardy quest for it, Bloom shows a tenderness towards her readers by indulging us with what is so often denied us in real life.

She tells us of the fates of those Lillian meets, loves and leaves behind - the Jewish tailor in New York, the black prostitute in Seattle, the Chinese conwoman in Prince Rupert - some of them happy, some unhappy, yet all somehow appropriate.

Lillian's own fate is rather anti-climactic, though to the author's credit, it is hard to think of a more emotionally just one. No matter how much one yearns for it, perhaps life shouldn't be about chasing closure, it seems to say, but about being willing to open our hearts, again and again, to the unknown.

If you like this, read: Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom (1999, $21.27 with GST, Books Kinokuniya)

In her debut novel, Bloom explores love found in unexpected places and forms.