Before All the World: A Novel
by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Buy on Amazon“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.
Recommended by
"“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."
NPR Books We Love — 2022 · apps.npr.org