Title: When the Angels Left the Old Country
Author: Sacha Lamb
Year of Publication: 2022
Publisher: Levine Querido
Why I Bought It/Borrowed It: I placed this book on hold at my public library as soon as I heard it won the 2023 Sydney Taylor Book Award (Young Adult).
Two Sentence Summary: When the Angels Left the Old Country had a very familiar feel as I read about an angel and a demon, chevrusas for thousands of years, leaving their shtetl to determine the whereabouts of missing emigrants to America. Interspersed with Hebrew and Yiddish (a glossary is at the back), this book takes us on a trans-Atlantic voyage, to the teeming hustle of Hester Street; a poetic, tender, and sprawling; and ultimately a love story without boundaries between sex and gender.
You May Know Sacha Lamb from: The Horn Book Sydney Taylor Book Award 2023 Blog Tour interview.
How did humans do it? How did they hold so many thoughts in their heads at once? How did they manage to love themselves and their families, and also have enemies, and go from place to place learning?
When Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb