An angel and a demon decide to immigrate

When the Angels Left the Old Country, Sacha Lamb  (library book)

I don't remember where I saw this book recommended, but I was intrigued enough to put it on my library list.

"Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her. Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America. But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they’ve left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold."  (publisher's blurb)

At the start of the story, the angel doesn't have a name, or rather its name changes constantly with its purpose - which is often counteracting the mischief that Little Ash gets up to. Ash is called "Little" because he is one of many sons of the Demon King Ashmedai, but he himself has almost no magic, "belonging to that class of creatures another people might call fairies, and we Jews know as sheydim: mischievous spirits of the earth who enjoy leading people astray." The angel receives the name "Uriel" when Ash forges papers to allow them to immigrate outside of Russian Poland. Accepting that name changes it in ways that I still don't fully understand, and also changes its relationship with Ash. But then so do all their adventures.

The first part of the story, where demon and angel set out on their travels, and Rose on hers, was enlightening. Much of what I read about immigration to North America focuses on the voyage and arrival. I hadn't thought about how much work it could take just to get to a major immigration port. This is fiction, of course, but it made me want to know more. Ash and the angel go first to Warsaw, where they discover the dangers of trusting the wrong immigrant agents. Sacha Lamb included a very helpful glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew phrases, but I could also wish for a bibliography.

I pulled this almost at random from my stack of library books one day last week when I wasn't sure what I wanted to read. I fell into the story from the first page and read it with great delight. I was probably primed for it, having just read a non-fiction work about Jewish migration and immigration in the same period, Rachel Cockerell's Melting Point. With so many of the people Rose, Ash, and Uriel meet in New York working in the garment district, it also links to another book on my TBR stacks, Triangle by David Von Drehle, Here the sweatshop workers are organizing and striking for better working conditions.