Before All the World

A Novel

By: Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Narrated by: Moriel Rothman-Zecher

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, 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.

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 the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

©2022 Moriel Rothman-Zecher (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A Beautiful Thanks!

A Yinglish paean to the Yiddish language in poetic prose with debts to Walt Whitman, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Henry Roth and the American Jewish poets writing in Yiddish. With hindsight, we may come to see it as the quintessential American Jewish novel. For who would we American Jews be without the Yiddish-speaking generation that emigrated from Eastern Europe and built here a new Yiddishe Americanische kultur. Has to be listened to in the author’s extraordinary recording before being read on the page