Before All The World - Softcover

Rothman-Zecher, Moriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1472157427 ISBN 13: 9781472157423

Publisher: Corsair, 2022

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'ikh gleyb nit az di gantze velt iz kheyshekh.'
'I do not believe that all the world is darkness.'

In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a speakeasy called Cricket's, a bar that serves, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, its 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, fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep, a Black man from the Seventh Ward, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion.

Leyb is haunted by memories of his life before amerike, back home in his village of Zatelsk, where everyone except himself and a young girl called Gittl was taken to the forest and killed in a devastating pogrom.

After all these years, Gittl makes her way to Philadelphia surrounded by the spirits of her dead siblings and, miraculously, finds Leyb.

Flowing and churning and seething with a glorious surge of language, carried along by questions of survival and hope and the possibility of a better world, 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, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

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About the Author

Moriel Rothman-Zecher was born in Jerusalem and raised primarily in Yellow Springs, Ohio. His first novel, Sadness is a White Bird was published in 2019, for which he received the National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' Honour. It was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the winner of the Ohioana Book Award, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, the winner of the Cincinnati Books by the Banks Author Award, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Moriel teaches Creative Writing at the University of Dayton and online through the Catapult Writing Program. He is the recipient of two MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature and is the Associate Editor of the anthology Kingdom of Olives and Ash (Edited by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon; published by HarperCollins, May 2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Haaretz, Sojourners Magazine and elsewhere.

From the Back Cover

'Before All the World is beautiful and original. Very quickly this novel starts to work on the mind, making itself felt in complex and powerful and visionary ways, led by the rhythm in the language and the urge to make that language new' Colm T�ib�n, author of The Magician

'ikh gleyb nit az di gantze velt iz kheyshekh'
'I do not believe that all the world is darkness'

In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles 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, fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep, a Black man from the Seventh Ward, speaking to him in Jewish. Charles, who calls him 'Lion', and with whom he will fall in love.

But Leyb is haunted by memories of life before. Memories from another continent and the village where he was born. From Zatelsk where, one day, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl and he himself, was taken to the forest and killed.

When, miraculously, Gittl's poems bring her to Philadelphia, Leyb's two lifetimes come together. And surrounding the survivors, the talkative spirits of the littlest ones of Zatelsk who did not . . .

Flowing with a glorious surge of language, carried along by questions of survival and hope and the possibility of a better world, 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, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?