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Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Autore di Sadness Is a White Bird: A Novel

2+ opere 153 membri 14 recensioni

Opere di Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Before All the World (2022) 31 copie

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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.
… (altro)
 
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Sarah-Hope | 1 altra recensione | Dec 27, 2022 |
The Publisher Says: 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 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, 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 the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed.

Then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, thanks to a poem she wrote and the intervention of a shadowy character known only as the Baroness of Philadelphia. And surrounding Gittl 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?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: 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.
… (altro)
½
 
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richardderus | 1 altra recensione | Oct 31, 2022 |
19-year Jonathan returns to Israel from the U.S. to serve in the Israel Defense Force, in part to honor his grandfather and in part, his Jewish identity. Through his family, he meets the son and daughter of a Palestinian friend, and becomes very friendly with the twins, spending as much as his free time as possible with Laith and Nimreen, eventually becoming intimate with both. Their cross cultural friendship is refreshing. But, of course, the long-standing conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians eventually interferes. The author writes well, even poetically at times, but I did not care for the second person narrative format nor the ending in particular.… (altro)
 
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skipstern | 11 altre recensioni | Jul 11, 2021 |
This is a story about an American Jewish high school student that moves to Israel and tries to out Israeli everyone including joining the IDF. He falls in love with a set of Palestine twins, and that's when the young man gets conflicted. He has some sexual experiences with both the female and male twin, and that starts to get into the area of creepiness.
 
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kerryp | 11 altre recensioni | Jul 4, 2020 |

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