'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?