To echo other reviews: I wish I had a text to follow along while listening to the audiobook. I loved the Yiddish passages and they are important to the story, but I feel like I may have missed something along the way. The author does an excellent job narrating the audiobook, for which I added an extra star.

First of all, I just needed to thank both @booksforwardpr and @fsgbooks for sending me this eccentric fictional tale of trials and devastation that will leave you cherishing this book for all of time to come.

SCENE: It’s the height of the Prohibition era in the heart of Philadelphia and a colorful cast of characters link up under unforeseen circumstances, spreading their culture, language and way of life amongst each other – surviving the critical traumas of their upbringing and hoping on better days to come.

In a former speakeasy called Cricket’s, Leyb meets a black man named Charles who knows how to speak Yiddish. Leyb, who will become known as Lion, is shocked, as he didn’t know any non-Jews could speak the language. He and Gittl were the only two Jews to survive the slaughter of their village. By coincidence, Gittl is also now in Philadelphia, due to a poem she wrote and someone known only as the Baroness of Philadelphia. The two, separately, reflect on the events that led them here and how they will go forward with their lives.

I wonder if I would have liked this book better if I had a physical copy or an ebook rather than the audiobook, especially with the Yiddish in the book. The book seems to be beloved by most readers, but I spent most of my time not sure what was going on. It didn’t seem that there was much of a plot. I think being able to go back and reread parts as necessary would have helped, especially during the parts that seemed especially stream-of-consciousness. If you are intrigued by the book blurb, I would suggest checking out a physical copy of this book unless you are familiar with Yiddish.

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing me an audio ARC of this book.

Written in English and Yiddish with some wonderful and hilarious trans-literations thrown in, this experimental novel is simply devastating. Like his previous work, this book explores the relationship of three people thrown together by proximity and chance to further delve into a distinct time and place. This book charts two Jews, escaped from the pogroms of Eastern Europe and into America to see what building a life might look like. On the other side of this story comes Charles, a black man in 1930s Philadelphia who is dealing with the complexities of pre-civil rights America while also working with the early communist movement. These friends and occasional lovers strive to build a better world, for themselves , for those they lost, and for those still to come.