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A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.
"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 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, 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.
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?
"Rothman-Zecher delivers a rich and engrossing narrative of two Jewish immigrants in the U.S. and a Black writer who translates their story from the Yiddish...It's a powerful story, brilliantly told." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Those who have the patience and receptivity required will be impressed and moved by this one-of-a-kind creation." - Kirkus Reviews
"Original, daring, experimental, moving, poignant, engaging...With shades of Tony Kushner and Cynthia Ozick...Before All the World understands how our worlds are made by words, and in the altering of the latter we may as yet redeem the former." - The Millions, "Most Anticipated Books of 2022"
"Before All the World is beautiful and original. It is also strange, arresting, high-risk. 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 Tóibín, author of The Magician
"Before All the World is a song about survival and a refusal to be erased. Daringly crafted and poetically told, this novel is a celebration of Moriel Rothman-Zecher's extraordinary talent, compassion, and love for humanity. To read Before All the World is to abandon all of our expectations and privileges so that the torch of curiosity and the beauty of words can lead us to unexpected places, where we can see ourselves in those whom we might have considered the Other." - Nguyen Phan Que Mai, author of The Mountains Sing
"Evocative, inventive, vivid, and strange, Before All the World is a mesmeric, enrapturing read." - Eimear McBride, author of Strange Hotel
This information about Before All the World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
Moriel Rothman-Zecher is the author of the novels Before All the World and Sadness Is a White Bird, for which he received the National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' Honor, and which 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.
His essays and poems have been published or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Haaretz, the New York Times, Paper Brigade Literary Magazine, The Paris Review's Daily, Runner's World, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, ZYZZYVA Magazine, and elsewhere.
Moriel is the ...
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