Before All The World

‘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, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion.

Leyb is haunted by memories of his life before amerike, back home in his village of Zatelsk, where everyone except himself and a young girl called Gittl was taken to the forest and killed in a devastating pogrom.

After all these years, Gittl makes her way to Philadelphia surrounded by the spirits of her dead siblings and, miraculously, finds Leyb.

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?