Before All the World: A Novel

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, 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 memorie...