Before All The World - Softcover

Rothman-Zecher, Moriel

 
9781472157423: Before All The World

Inhaltsangabe

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

'Before All the World is 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

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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.

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'Before All the World is beautiful and original. 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


'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 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. Memories from another continent and the village where he was born. From Zatelsk where, one day, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl and he himself, was taken to the forest and killed.

When, miraculously, Gittl's poems bring her to Philadelphia, Leyb's two lifetimes come together. And surrounding the survivors, the talkative spirits of the littlest ones of Zatelsk who did not . . .

Flowing 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. It asks, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

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