Before All The World - Hardcover

Rothman-Zecher, Moriel

 
9781472157416: Before All The World

Inhaltsangabe

A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.

'Beautiful and original . . .
making itself felt in complex and powerful and visionary ways, led by rhythm in the language and the urge to make that language new' Colm Tóibín

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is a Jerusalem-born novelist and poet. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for a Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a National Jewish Book Award, won an Ohioana Book Award, and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His poetry and essays have been published in The American Poetry Review, Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, and ZYZZYVA, and he is the recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honor, two MacDowell Fellowships, and Yiddishkayt's Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellowship.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

'Before All the World is beautiful and original. It is also strange, arresting, high-risk. Very quickly this novel starts to work on the mind, making itself felt in complex and powerful and visionary ways, led by the rhythm in the language and the urge to make that language new' Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician

'Evocative, inventive, vivid, and strange, Before All the World is a mesmeric, enrapturing read' Eimear McBride, author of Strange Hotel

'Before All the World startles and swirls, and makes fresh the experience of language itself. It has it all: a gripping story, an original structure, and a tender, ghostly glow' Justin Torres, author of We the Animals


'Original, daring, experimental, moving, poignant, engaging . . . Before All the World understands how our worlds are made by words, and in the altering of the latter we may as yet redeem the former' Ed Simon, The Millions, 'Most Anticipated Books of 2022'

'Rich and engrossing . . . A powerful story, brilliantly told' Publishers Weekly, starred review

'A one-of-a-kind creation' Kirkus Reviews

Aus dem Klappentext

'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 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, speaking to him in Jewish; Charles, who calls him 'Lion', and with whom he will fall in love.

But Leyb is haunted by memories of life before, on another continent and the village of his birth where, one day, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl and he himself, was taken to the forest and killed.

Leyb's two lifetimes come together when Gittl arrives in Philadelphia, thanks to a poem she wrote and the intervention of a shadowy character known only as the Baroness. And surrounding Gittl are malokhim, the talkative spirits of her siblings.

Flowing and churning with a glorious surge of language, 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?

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels