by Amy Bloom
First published 2016
Lilian Leyb arrives in New York in 1924 at twenty-two, escaping Russia after pogroms killed her family. She rents half a mattress in a crowded Lower East Side tenement and steals a seamstress job at a Yiddish theater from other desperate women. Her friend Yaakov, a tailor turned actor and playwright, gives her a thesaurus to master English. She memorizes lists of synonyms like a prayer. Then Lilian learns her daughter Sophie might still be alive somewhere in Siberia. The discovery transforms her immigrant story into something else entirely. She sews a map of the American West into her coat and boards the Chicago express. Her journey takes her through Seattle's Jazz District underworld and into the wild territories of Alaska and the Yukon, where trappers work the frozen land. What begins as the familiar tale of a newcomer building a life becomes a mother's desperate search across a continent.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, mothers-search
Setting: New York, Russia, Siberia, Seattle, Alaska, Yukon
Period: 1924
320 pages · Paperback · Editions Charleston