Tender-Hearted

An email popped up in my inbox last week, announcing that a book I had on hold was waiting for me at the library circulation desk.

I’d forgotten about the book; frequently I will see a review or hear an author on the radio and I’ll quickly log onto the library website and request it.

The book, Away, by Amy Bloom, is fantastic. A tragic adventure story with an ambiguously happy ending (I skipped ahead), the language is unusually sprightly. The words build on one another until you are clicking along like a train on a track, and then the author derails you with a heart-stopping plot revelation.

Unfortunately, I may not be able to finish reading it.

Deeply engaged in the story of Lillian, a Russian Jew emigrating to New York City in the early 1920s, I was unprepared for the turn of the story line (spoiler alert).

Lillian is bereft over the loss of her three-year-old daughter, Sophie, in a pogrom.

The tale abruptly reveals the loss, and leaves the reader unsure of how or if the child was killed, until well into the first section of the book.

The toddler is wrapped in a scarf and her mother drops her gently out a window, telling the baby to run to the chicken coop and hide. Meanwhile, Lillian’s entire extended family and her husband are gutted in front of her and Lillian herself is badly injured.

She survives, only to wake and find just a trace of her daughter – a blue hair ribbon.

The story carries on, but I am suddenly unfocused.

For all I can think about is my own girl. Three months shy of three years old.

Her face, her curls. Her small body.

The heroine of the novel decides that “a long fight and a slow death” will give her child the best chance of survival, and faces her attackers with the determination to save her daughter’s life.

It physically hurts me to think of this. The pain in my chest is as real as if I were the one forced to make this choice.

Rest assured, this is the same choice I would make. My life for hers; more than a fair trade. Her delicate limbs and innocent eyes, more valuable than the blood in my veins.

I have been a reader for more than three decades. I have never shied away from a book because of strong content. On the contrary, the more evocative the plot, the more it engaged me.

But this. This I cannot bear. I cannot bear to identify the child sleeping upstairs in her crib with one set outside in the freezing Russian winter wearing only hair ribbons, a white nightgown an a knitted blue shawl.

I cannot bear the thought of my daughter like this. And this is the image that keeps coming to my mind, unbidden, as the tragic story unfolds. I cannot erase The Poo’s face from this imaginary child’s body, this child born of a stranger’s imagination.

I am barely able to hold in check my desire to go get her right now, in the middle of the night, and press her beating heart to my own. I want to run my hands over her, reassuring myself of her wholeness.

I want to sleep with her in my arms, my grown-up body guarding her freshly minted one from any harm. I want to bury my lips in her silky curls and feel the pulse in the veins threading through her temples.

I am struck by a few lines in this novel, lines that describe how Lillian moved through her days prior to the pogrom. She lived as I do – puffing up in annoyance with her husband, resenting her parents for their past mistakes, and feigning patience with her daughter when really what she would have liked to do was give the child a good, strong shake.

Sometimes I feel that way.

Tonight all I feel is dreadfully, woefully tender-hearted, aching with my own daily blindness to the beauty and light that stands before me, three feet tall and demanding a fresh cup of juice.

In 33 short months, how I have changed.

Oh, I am changed.