Before all the world

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Rothman-Zecher, Moriel

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

330 pages ; 20 cm.

Genre:

Historical fiction.

Religious fiction.

Summary:

"A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old. '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. 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?"--Publisher description.

Subject Term:

Jews -- Fiction.

Immigrants -- United States -- Fiction.

African Americans -- Fiction.

Pogroms -- Fiction.

Publication Info:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Subject:

Jews -- Fiction.

Immigrants -- United States -- Fiction.

African Americans -- Fiction.

Pogroms -- Fiction.

Philadelphia (Pa.) -- Fiction

Historical fiction.

Religious fiction.

Hebrews

Israelites

Jewish people

Jewry

Judaic people

Judaists

United States -- Foreign population

African Americans -- United States

Afro-Americans

Black Americans

Colored people (United States)

Negroes

SAILS ISBN:

9780374231668

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Elizabeth Taber Library	ROT	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	FIC ROTHMAN-ZECHER	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... New Bedford Francis J. Lawler Branch	FIC ROTHMAN-ZECHER	FICTION	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

An NPR Best Book of the Year

A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.

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.

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?

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Rothman-Zecher (Sadness Is a White Bird) 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. After a massacre at the fictional Zatelsk shtetl during the anti-Bolshevik pogroms in the early 1920s, survivor Leyb Mireles makes it to the U.S. as a young boy. Over a decade later, 19-year-old Leyb meets Charles Patterson, a 33-year-old communist ghostwriter, at a Philadelphia speakeasy catering to gay men. They strike up a friendship, but after Leyb misconstrues another man's actions as sexual advances, the stranger beats him. Leyb is then arrested in a police raid and further assaulted. The violence triggers Leyb to remember the attack at Zatelsk, and after his release he tracks down Charles and the two men become close. Meanwhile, Gittl Khayeles, 33, another survivor who rescued Leyb from the massacre and who's spent the intervening years in various Ukrainian and Belarusian cities, arrives in Philadelphia at the behest of a rich Jewish woman who summons Gittl after reading her poem about the pogrom in a literary journal. Gittl clings to an oft-repeated mantra, "all the world is not darkness," while searching for Leyb. She eventually writes Leyb's and her stories in a Yiddish manuscript, which Charles then crudely translates in 1935 (he calls the shtetl a "dustvillage"). As Rothman-Zecher gradually unfolds the remarkable stories of how Gittl reconnects with Leyb, and how Charles comes to possess Gittl's manuscript, Charles offers droll commentary on his creative license as a translator and sustains an inventive blend of languages ("Leyb inbreathed one breath through his nose, awaytook one glass from Charles's hand, downdrank half its contents in one zhlyuk"). It's a powerful story, brilliantly told. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (Oct.)

Kirkus Review

An account of a genocide written by a fictional character named Gittl, translated by a fictional character named Charles into a wildly Yiddishized and jabberwocked version of English. The premise of Rothman-Zecher's experimental second novel is that there was a town called Zatelsk where all but two people were taken into the woods and shot in a single afternoon. One of the survivors was a boy named Leyb, the other a girl named Gittl who lost a large family of siblings. Both wind up in 1930s Philadelphia, where Leyb meets an urbane Black man named Charles in a gay bar. Charles introduces young Leyb to the ways of the world and becomes close to Gittl as well. Included in the story are accounts of meetings between Charles and Gittl to discuss the particulars of his translation of her "mayseh," such as what words should be capitalized, and whether "Kuren Smerti" (list of the dead) can be "oversat" (an anglification of iberzetzen, Yiddish for translated) or should be left in the original Ukrainian. There's also quite a bit of passionate sex, communism, and a long section recording Gittl's burial prayers for each of her 296 murdered townspeople. (With so many children among them, this has a particularly powerful resonance in the summer of 2022.) Part of a sentence describing Gittl's life in the "beforemayseh" gives a sense of Rothman-Zecher's invented language: "Hendl was halfawakebecome with Gittl's upsitting, what served her almost right for the way she had murmured in her sleep nearly the whole night, as in almost every and each night, spooling and unspooling phantasmagoric psalms as the moon glimpted over the dustvillage, trying vainishly to plug its earholes, yoh, but it could not for it was as though the moon's hands, wrought from stretches of nightsky, were tightfastened under a blanket of darkness, its starsiblings murmursome and blithely snorish all around it, no bowing or prostrating soever, and this is a good kind of badfeeling, how it is to be pinned by one's siblings' snortbreathing and sleepspeaking...." Those who have the patience and receptivity required will be impressed and moved by this one-of-a-kind creation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.