Before All the World

An NPR Best Book of the YearA 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?