Before All the World

by Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Genres: Jewish Fiction

Synopsis

In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket's, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue is not known beyond his people. And yet here is suave Charles, a Black man from the Seventh Ward, a fellow traveler of Red Emma's, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion.



Lion is haunted by memories of life before, in Zatelsk, where everyone in his village, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed.



And then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, thanks to a poem she wrote and the intervention of a shadowy character known only as the Baroness of Philadelphia. And surrounding Gittl are malokhim, the spirits of her siblings.



Moriel Rothman-Zecher's Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way ahead, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future. It asks the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

Release date: October 11, 2022

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 336

Sample

a mayseh

Once there was a child what was called Reyza.

di mayseh iz avek.1



a beforemayseh

Once there was a jew what was called Gittl, and Gittl sat amidst a pile of her siblings what were called Anshl and Hendl and Zimml and Reyza. When the clan of death came, they took everyone to the forest except for Gittl and one other jew. The other jew was called Leyb.