Amy Bloom's new book is an eventful novel. In its 236 pages are countless thefts, prostitutions, murders and suicides.

The protagonist, Lillian Leyb, has come to America from Russia after witnessing the slaughter of nearly her whole family and barely escaping, bloody and wounded, with her own life.

		"AWAY" By Amy Bloom Random House ($23.95)

In the chaos and bloodshed, her daughter Sophie is lost. An aunt tells Lillian she saw little Sophie (at least her ribboned hair) floating down the river. Lillian then leaves Turov and the violence of the pogroms there to begin a new life in America.

With no money, no spare clothing, a scar from a knife slash across her body and no apparent sentiment, she's ready to make her way -- a game gal, game for just about anything.

Many of the Russian immigrants in her new community are like her. They grapple for jobs, lie and cheat and steal. Lillian shares a bed on a rotating shift with male workers in a tiny apartment leased by a woman who herself sleeps on two kitchen chairs in order to be able to rent and re-rent the beds.

This is Lillian's life. There's nothing sentimental about it. She appears to believe that if she stayed in Russia, she would have less than nothing, so nothing in New York looks good.

Her first job is as a seamstress for the Goldfadn Theatre, one of several Yiddish theaters operating in New York in the 1920s. Lillian can't sew. She can barely speak any English.

She gets ahead by wit and grit, by playing up to manager Reuben and his matinee-idol son, Meyer. She lets them know she will do anything they want.

She becomes friends with Yaakov, a tailor, who admires how she looks but also "her world view which is on the dark side, like his own, like any sensible person's."

There is almost joy in the early part of the novel -- in Lillian's struggle to learn English, in her delight over anything decent to eat, in her own personal history bumping up against the practices of ethnic theater for ethnic audiences.

In this world, Meyer Burstein plays Romeo (to great acclaim) as a suitable mensch with a quality nose equal to John Barrymore's.

Bloom's apparent research into the East Village, Jewish theater and life in New York is fascinating, worth a novel of its own. And so (as in Lore Segal's "Her First American") is the recounting of an immigrant's struggle to learn English. Yaakov helps Lillian fall in love with synonyms.

She sits in an apartment waiting for Meyer, "flipping through her dictionary, prepared to have sex, willing to say to anyone who might want to know that Meyer is her lover, willing to be his lover (beloved, flame, inamorata, sweetheart) if that's what he wants."

But Lillian doesn't get to stay in New York -- or in this dark comic novel. When a cousin brings her the rumor that her daughter is alive, she begins a journey of mythic proportions in which she faces just about every possible hardship -- I can't think of anything that's left out -- that poverty and prejudice can hand her.

There's illness and bloodshed and compromise to spare as she makes her way to Seattle and then the Yukon. The anger that fills Lillian and that drives most of her interactions would be too much to bear were it not for the rich writing that gives it mythic proportions.

She must find Sophie, even if trying to find her daughter kills her. The journey and the search become her life, her only goal.

We understand that she's seeking her own lost innocence. So long as she can love a child who delighted others and who experienced delight, she is not completely hardened or lost.

Lillian surprises herself at one point by not being able to steal or compromise her body. Is she getting soft? She hopes not. We hope so. That's the experience of this tough, engaging book.