Continuing our partnership with Jewish Book Council, The Center for Fiction was thrilled to have welcomed Dayton Literary Peace Prize and National Jewish Book Award finalist Moriel Rothman-Zecher to the stage for a conversation on his mesmerizing, inventive novel, Before All the World. In 1930s Philadelphia, three souls seize new life while haunted by the old. Nestled in this wild dream of a narrative are several love stories: two men of different countries and races who find comfort in each other; a man and a woman who spark each other’s lust through intellectual play; a woman and a boy who are the only survivors of their history; a man and the daughter he will never know. Rothman-Zecher explores 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. He was joined in conversation by Jason Diamond (Searching for John Hughes).
Presented with Jewish Book Council.
Featured Book
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Before All the World
By Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Published by FSG
A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.
“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 speakeasy called Cricket’s, a bar that serves, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, its 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, a fellow traveler of Red Emma’s, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion.
Lion is haunted by memories of life before, in Zatelsk, where everyone in his village, everyone except Gittl and the ten non-Jews and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed.
And then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too. And surrounding her are malokhim, the spirits of her siblings.
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, Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s 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?
Featuring
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Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Moriel Rothman-Zecher
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 longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. 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 the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honor, two MacDowell Fellowships, and Yiddishkayt’s Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellowship.
Photo Credit: Andy Snow
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Jason Diamond
Jason Diamond
Jason Diamond is the author of the memoir Searching for John Hughes and the essay collection The Sprawl. He’s a contributor at GQ and has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review, New York magazine, the Atlantic and many other publications.
