Before All The World Av Moriel Rothman-Zecher

<p><i>I do not believe that all the world is darkness.</i><br><br>In the swirl of Prohibition-era Philadelphia, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket''s, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, <i>feygeles</i>. Leyb is startled to hear his native tongue spoken by this beautiful Black man from the Seventh Ward whose life he will come to share.<br><br>But Leyb is haunted by memories from before he came to America, growing up in the shtetl of Zatelsk, where one day every last person - except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and he himself - was taken to the forest by the Red Army and killed. <br><br>Flowing with a surge of language and synchrony, Gittl and Leyb are reunited - surrounded by the murmur of angelic voices - and together with Charles they each grapple with how to face, and sieze, what lies ahead.<br><br>Carried along by questions of survival and hope, <i>Before All the World</i> lays bare the impossibility of escap