Moriel Rothman-Zecher is a Jerusalem-born novelist and poet. His debut novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. His poetry and essays have been published in Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, and ZYZZYVA, and he is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships. In Before All the World: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Leyb and Charles meet in a Philadelphia speakeasy at the end of Prohibition. The bar, says Charles in secondhand Yiddis, welcomes feygeles. Leyb is startled; 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 Yiddish to a young man he will come to call Lion. Leyb is haunted by memories of Zatelsk, where everyone except him, 10 non-Jews, and a young poet named Gittl was taken to the forest and killed. And then miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, surrounded by the spirits of her siblings and with a shadowy patron. 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, 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.
