I finally finished reading my ARC of Before All the World by Moriel Rothman-Zechariah. I would like to have enjoyed reading it, but it was far too difficult to plow my way through. It was terribly distracting not to be able to understand much of the dialogue as a large part of it isn’t written in English but rather Hebrew or Yiddish (a combination of Hebrew and German.) Instead of providing any immediate translation or context for understanding much of the language, the author relies on annotations revealed at the end of each chapter, which again isn’t conducive to a smooth understanding of events. The subject matter and story line is interesting, if one is able to get passed the difficulty in understanding the words. For me, the book was a great disappointment. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the author and to NetGalley for providing me a free digital copy of the book prior to its publication for my review, and I'm providing this review voluntarily,

What can I say? I probably only understood 2/3 of Before All the World book, but that was enough to make for a riveting reading experience. And I'm more than willing to reread to improve my understanding.

Why the troubles? This absolutely brilliant book is written in
• English
• English compound words that are direct translations from Yiddish
• Yiddish
The Yiddish sections were challenging because I don't speak Yiddish beyond the twenty or so words that have made it into the wider lexicon. The English compound words used as translations of Yiddish are like endless puzzles the reader has to work through. Instead of "earlier," we get "in the before moment." When a character appears suddenly, it's "as if throughwallwalking." A "receding" hairline is "backfallish." The beauty of this is that
• it slows the reader down in a good way
• it makes the reader really picture the actions and objects being described
• it creates a rhythm that simply wouldn't exist without the "Yiddishisms."

Before All the World is set in the 1930s and tells the story of three people. Leyb and Gittl are the sole survivors of a pogrom that decimated their village in Russia. At the time, Gittl was reaching adolescence; Leyb was an infant. Both Leyb and Gittl immigrate to the U.S., winding up in Philadelphia (which is transliterated as philadelphiya). Our third character, Charles, is a communist, Yiddish-speaking Black man (yes, there's a back story). Leyb and Charles meet in a semi-secret gay bar. Gittl, who becomes a poet, is sponsored for travel to the U.S. by "the Baroness," a wealthy Philadelphia Jew who likes the idea of having a poet at hand to perform on social occasions. She reconnects with Leyb and meets Charles. She also carries the voices of her murdered siblings with her, so she is never alone.

Given who they are, all three are marginalized in multiple ways, and the novel wrestles with issues of capitalism, antisemitism, racism, and nationalism—but never in a way that feels forced. These are simply the parameters defining the characters' lives.

This novel is genuinely profound in what it asks of its readers and what it offers in exchange. Before All the World is a book to travel through slowly, letting yourself soak in its languages and identities.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

I am really sorry, because this started out in a very promising way, but as a non-native English speaker I am suffering too much from the Jiddisch mixed in with the English. I have to make too much of an effort. I would rather not rate but seeing as that is not allowed I will go for the middle way of three stars. But if there is ever a Dutch translation I will make sure to read it as I am still curious to see what will happen.

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded up for chutzpah

I fear what I am about to say will doom a very fine read in too many of y'all's eyes: This isn't a standard-English-only novel. The characters sometimes speak Yiddish, sometimes speak as though mentally translating Yiddish into English on the fly, and all of it at the author's preferred energetic pace. The best I can say about those whose reading doesn't often stretch to variants of English is, there are very helpful footnotes.

Oh well. I had to say it despite the fact that most of y'all just clicked over to I Can Has Cheezburger? for a chuckle or two.

If you're still here, let me assure you that there's a lot to love about this story. Leyb/Lion, a gay Jew, is really and truly alive for me; his on-again, off-again love for the surprising Charles, a Black labor-organizing socialist-sympathizing Yiddish-speaking multihyphenate whose precarious identities are beautifully balanced. Their love story, to my gay eye vanishingly light on sex, is only one of the story's love stories. Gittl, a poet/seer of angels, is Leyb/Lion's nowsister who was presumed killed in a Red Army pogrom he avoided by being thrown out of Zatelsk for his faggoty ways. She shows up in Philadelphia, mirabile dictu, and is fêted by the middle-class Jewish community led by a soi-disant Baroness there as a harbinger of socialist paradise...despite almost dying at the hands of the "socialist" Soviets. This lionization ends when Gittl and Charles, um, well.

How this dissonant collection of adherents and believers and practitioners harmonizes their modes of being, their inner identities, and their actions is as one would expect: inconsistently and imperfectly and, all too often, inconsiderately. Every adult has learned to accept that others love in their own ways, or has been carted off to a safe place with lots of lovely pills to manage the aftermath of refusing the lesson. Leyb/Lion and Charles with their utterly amazing intersections of identity are, to no one's surprise, among the most wounded. Charles's belief in the socialist revolution survives the movement's apathy towards acknowledging the hideous harm caused by slavery, and its continuing horrors and cruelties. Leyb/Lion's gayness, well...Jews weren't mad for it then, though I understand there are more accepting branches of Judaism in modern times, and have no reluctance about letting him know he's less than, lower down in their esteem because of it. Gittl's a woman. What else needs be said, that fully explains the horrors she has and will endure before, during, and likely after amerike, philadelphiye, the doctor who slurmed out (of) his amerikanische, toothjutting mouth the horrible, cruel orders to sedate her...are all in Life's past. It is this dissonance, however, that shaved a half-star off my rating. I wasn't as convinced as I thought the author expected me to be that these people would enact the steps they danced to. I was close to believing it for Gittl and less so for Leyb/Lion; Charles, the man made of and for Love, perhaps least of all. It wasn't an existential, "what are you even talking about?" level of dissonance but a quietly uneasy mental drumbeat of "...really...?" throughout the read.

“What will you do before all the world?”

That is the heart of the novel; that is the wisdom the reader is offered by the read. It's not clear to me that the characters *answer* this question. It is clear to me that they live in its words, that they think inside the whorls of that question mark and fall onto the finality of the period at its base.

I give up. Over to those who have more patience, might know some Yiddish, and enjoy experimental novels to make sense of this, Thanks to netgalley for the ARC, I can't imagine being the editor.

Two survivors of a Red Army pogrom search for purpose and connection in Rothman-Zecher’s latest novel. It’s a story that brings readers face-to-face with unfathomable childhood trauma while pondering complex themes of racial and religious persecution, intersecting subordinate identities, and the socialist movement in pre-World War II America.

Strong, appealing characters carry Rothman-Zecher’s necessarily heavy and emotionally-painful story. Leyb, now nineteen years old, was a small child when all of his family and neighbors were taken to the forest by soldiers to be massacred in a village in Eastern Europe. Through a network of extended relatives, he was brought to faraway Philadelphia and raised and educated in the city’s Jewish-Orthodox community. Living among hard-working, religious families, Leyb develops an appreciation for worldly learning, though he remains an outsider, drifting through an urban environment (“amerike”) he longs to but struggles to understand. While he’s given the nickname Lion, Leyb is much more of a lamb– gentle, trusting, and ill-prepared to protect himself from the harshness of the world. He also has the task of figuring out how to live as a gay man in a community and a broader world that considers his nature shameful and deviant.

Gittl was just a few years older than Leyb when their village was massacred, and their lives diverge and then intertwine miraculously. In contrast to shy, vulnerable Leyb, Gittl is a hardened fighter who made her way across Europe cleaning houses and eventually working as a translator for a Marxist newspaper. Though equipped with greater agency than Leyb, due, in part to the demands placed on Jewish peasant girls to take care of home and family, the violence from her childhood has made her a loner in a tough, emotionally-detached way. Whereas Leyb seeks love and connection, Gittl looks to survive through human transactions that can easily be left behind. Her deeper connections are from the past via the spirits of her siblings who are always with her, giving her strength to persevere. A mantra echoes in her head: “Gittl, never alone.”

Both Leyb and Gittl’s lives are transformed when they meet Charles, a writer who travels in Philadelphia’s socialist circles. Charles is also a black man who knows quite well the tenuous position of minorities in society. Leyb meets Charles at an underground gay bar called Crickets, and they enter an affair. When Leyb is cast out by his community, Charles provides him refuge. Later, Gittl finds herself in Philadelphia and joins their household.

The author commits to an authentic voice for his characters, which is challenging at times, with dialogue and internal monologue in Yiddish and regional colloquialisms that require reading extensive footnotes to follow. Yet this is a story that provokes the mind and heart on many levels. In poetic passages, one feels the shock and dissonance of Leyb and Gittl’s trauma, and their fractured, sometimes dizzying narratives convey the lasting disorientation from childhood loss and displacement.

To equal effect, Rothman-Zecher’s novel raises profound questions about the nature of human oppression and the attempts of social movements to address its complexities. Charles, for example, finds a place to put his literary skill to use within a radical labor rights organization that is ambivalent about acknowledging the impact of slavery in America. Leyb is shunned by fellow Jews whose oppressors would hardly spare them from annihilation because they agree with their disgust for gay men and lesbians. Gittl is welcomed to Philadelphia by middle-class Jews who proclaim socialism as salvation while her family and neighbors were butchered against the backdrop of communist revolution. “What will you do before all the world?” the author asks his characters, and of course the reader. One cannot give too much away in a review, but ultimately, the author offers a hopeful message about the courage of the human spirit.

A fascinating and moving work of literary fiction, which I would say is important reading for readers of all categories..

Reviewed for Out in Print.

What I liked - the Yiddish voice, accomplished both through actual Yiddish and English written in the syntax of a Yiddish speaker. I grew up with grandparents speaking isolated words of Yiddish, though my great-grandparents would've spoken more. I love how he drew on all my knowledge, and I loved the insider feeling. There can be something empowering about a minority group writing something that isn't for an outside audience, about assuming we have the right to just speak in our own voice the way our people speak. In this case he is preserving or reviving a form of speech that is almost lost, and I liked that.
I liked the portrayal of trauma, the way Gittl's siblings are always with her, sometimes haunting her and other times making her stronger, the way Leyb's adult trauma makes him recall and draw strength from his past trauma. I liked the connections between different types of oppression.

What I didn't like - There was no plot! A lot of major things happen: a pogrom, Leyb being kicked out of his home for being gay, Gittl coming to America. Yet somehow no story. Also, while the author was trying to link different oppression, there wasn't any overt discussion of what made these similar or different, they were sort of just all the same.

DNF
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for giving me the opportunity to read an e-arc of this

However I had to DNF this, I just couldn’t read it. I really struggled with the translation. I had no idea what was happening and I couldn’t pick it back up again

Quite dazzling prose, lyrical and poetic, Before All the World is probably most appreciated for those with the full understanding of the language and the characters' backgrounds. I would recommend it to anyone who sees themselves in the characters described in the blurb, as I'm sure this will offer a meaningful reading experience.

I am grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC of Before All the World. These opinions are my own.