When the Angels Left the Old Country is the debut novel of Sacha Lamb, published in 2022. It began as a serialized story on their tumblr, but was removed when they got a book deal. It won the Stonewall Book Award and the Sydney Taylor Book Award.
It contains the following tropes:
- Asmodeus: Little Ashmedai, like all his hundreds of brothers, is named after their father Ashmedai the demon lord.
- Broken Angel: After Uriel starts carrying the rebbe's ghost, it loses some of its angelic powers. It gets them back once the dybbuk is gone.
- Closet Key: Essie helps Rose realize that she's a lesbian.
- Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Prior to getting a name of its own, Uriel is easily distractable, getting entirely consumed by any task that crosses its path and forgetting about everything else. Little Ash has to make sure it doesn't wander off and turn into a sunbeam. The name means Uriel can now choose whether to follow these impulses, so Little Ash doesn't need to do as much minding—which actually makes him jealous and insecure, because a Uriel who doesn't need him might be a Uriel who doesn't want to be friends anymore.
- Cool Old Lady: Grandma Rivke notices that Ash is a demon, but she doesn't care.
- Disguised in Drag: Little Ash puts on a skirt to sneak out of Ellis Island.
- Ghostly Goals: The rebbe's ghost needs Uriel to tell his family of his passing so they can say Kaddish for him within a month of his death, or he'll turn into a dybbuk. Uriel waits too long for Little Ash on Ellis Island, and the rebbe becomes a dybbuk as predicted.
- Heel Realization: At the end, Solomon Boaz realizes what a terrible person he's been, confesses his sins to the rabbi, and sells his factory to the workers.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: When they don't want other people (usually Rose) to understand what they're saying, Ashel and Uriel communicate in Aramaic.
- Holy Burns Evil: Uriel's power makes short work of the demon doctor. When Ash becomes a Willing Channeler of the rebbe's dybbuk, it using holy names to perform magic causes his tongue to burn.
- Humanity Ensues: After Uriel the angel gets a name, it starts becoming more and more human, having to breathe and eat when it didn't before.
- An Immigrant's Tale: This follows the same general plot, but it's also queer and Urban Fantasy.
- Invisible to Normals: Demons can see people's sins, personified as creatures hanging around them. After a while, Uriel can see them too, though it can't tell them apart very well.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: That's the point, really. Little Ash (and the narrative) always calls the angel "it" because it isn't human.
- Mad Doctor: The demonic doctor at Ellis Island is revealed to be a Serial Killer, especially of other demons.
- Meaningful Name: The name Little Ash picks for the angel is Uriel Federman. Uriel is the name of an angel, meaning "light of God", and Federman is Yiddish for "feather man".note
- Non-Human Non-Binary/Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: Angels have No Biological Sex, and Uriel is always called "it", though it looks male to most people.
- Our Demons Are Different: At the beginning of the book, the narrator notes that sheydim (Jewish demons) are closer to what we might consider The Fair Folk. There are also Christian demons, and demons of any human culture that has them in its folklore.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: Little Ash eats the soul of Reb Fishl, who had extorted countless people and even murdered some. (It's implied that this is actually a metaphysical limitation of that power, and Little Ash couldn't have used it if Reb Fishl had been a good person.) Uriel kills the demon doctor Serial Killer, but doesn't eat the soul. Little Ash also kills one of Sullivan's men and Sullivan himself.
- Possession Burnout: A dybbuk possessing a person for too long will kill them, as almost happens to Isaak Shulman.
- Pronoun Trouble: Rose doesn't know Uriel is an angel for the first half or so of the book, and thinks Ash referring to Uriel as "it" is a quirk of their particular Yiddish dialect rather than Uriel's actual pronouns.
- Suddenly Bilingual: At first, the angel could only speak Hebrew or Aramaic. After becoming Uriel Federman, it knows Yiddish, and picks up English very quickly after arriving in America.
- Sue Donym: Little Ash chooses the alias Asher Klein. "Klein" means "small" in German and Yiddish.
- Villainous Parental Instinct: For all his faults, Boaz cares deeply for his daughter, and repents and makes amends at the end for her sake.
- What Is This Feeling?: After Humanity Ensues, Uriel starts feeling unfamiliar emotions, especially towards its longtime companion. At the end, it tells Ash that "You are the friend of my soul."
- Willing Channeler: Uriel lets the rebbe's spirit cling onto it while they're on the ship until it can reach his family in New York. To escape from the Sullivans' hideout, Ash offers his own body to the dybbuk so it will leave Isaak's body.
- Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Peter Sullivan's brother Jamie draws the line at threatening to shoot a girl, but his brother has no such compunctions.
