Before all the world
(Book)

Meeting Charles at a former speakeasy in Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb is shocked to discover a Black man who is fluent in Yiddish and becomes encouraged at the prospect of a better life in America.

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 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, 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 Gittl and the ten non-Jews and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed. And then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too. And surrounding her 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?