Before All the World: A Novel

"“I do not believe that all the world is darkness,” Gittl, a Jewish teenager, thinks one day upon waking from a strange dream. Soon, she is faced with the darkest of darknesses, a pogrom that leaves her and one child, Leyb, the sole survivors of their village. Years later, Leyb, living in Philadelphia, meets Charles, a Black man who speaks Yiddish, at a gay bar. In startling language filled with the flavor of Yiddish’s combination words, Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s book 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."