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? “In startling language filled with the flavor of Yiddish’s combination words, [ Before All the World ] moves forward and back and forward again in a dreamlike trance that acknowledges how the worst suffering exists side by side with the tender beauty of memory, friendship, words and the silences of recognition.” ―Ilana Masad, NPR “ Before All the World is poetry as it should be: deliberate while feeling casual, a game with words that is at once playful and deadly serious (sometimes by turns, sometimes truly simultaneously) . . . It swallowed me up, and then all at once, a word or a phrase would reach me like a bolt of lightning, charring and electrifying me all through” ―Jo Niederhoff, Seattle Book Review “Resembles something by Joyce or Samuel Beckett . . . A highly original and powerful tale told in defiance of the world’s darkness.” ―Stephanie Cross, The Daily Mail “Boldly imagined . . . Before All the World may be set in the 1930s, but it feels as though it is outside of time . . . Rothman-Zecher has uncovered something extraordinary: trauma itself is a kind of translation. It’s a recreation of events that becomes more removed as time goes on, and language is our only guide.” ―Mara Sandroff, Newcity Lit “This voice is so distinctive―and so winning―that, after I finished the novel, it seemed a bit like the voice of an old friend: one that I missed, one that could make me happy as soon as I heard it again.” ―Alec Gewirtz, The Nearness “Moriel Rothman-Zecher reads like a queer Jewish James Joyce . . . Before All the World tells a gorgeous and important story about loss and diaspora and queerness and love.” ―Rena J. Mosteirin, Enthusiasms “Rothman-Zecher has given us a history lesson disguised as a set of love stories. . . . Hope somehow emerges from trauma. Love is possible and in a variety of forms.” ―Anna Beresin, Evolve “ Before All the World leaves you breathless . . . [Rothman-Zecher] has found a way to teach us how to find out what is most important about ourselves by losing himself in this novel of ingenious daring imagination and allowing us to accompany him on his ride. It is a masterful accomplishment that remains with the reader long after finishing this brilliant work.” ―Elaine Margolin, Women in Judaism “Packed a powerful punch . . . One of the most impressive books I’ve read recently . . . Before All the World took me on a wild, but ultimately wonderful ride.” ―Rachel Esserman, The Reporter “[ Before All the World ] offers readers characters who defy the binaries of western colonialism, characters who defy the borders of established language, who are both mourning and joyful, who are willing to question what they have to offer, what they will do as they live their lives before all the world.” ―Jessica Thomas, The Yellow Springs News “An emotionally evocative exploration of the impossibility of escaping trauma, yet finding hope nevertheless when all seems destroyed.” ―Hannah Srour-Zackon, The Canadian Jewish News “Dazzling . . . Every sense is engaged by the novel’s precise, inventive language . . . [Readers] may see, hear, and smell the sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hopeful world portrayed.” ― AudioFile “At its core, Before All the World considers one essential question: what does it mean to remember the past while still imag