Purchase
Picador
October 2023
On Sale: October 10, 2023
336 pages
ISBN: 1250872162
EAN: 9781250872166
Kindle: B09NTJNJHW
Trade Paperback / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction Literary
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?
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