BEFORE ALL THE WORLD

An account of a genocide written by a fictional character named Gittl, translated by a fictional character named Charles into a wildly Yiddishized and jabberwocked version of English.

The premise of Rothman-Zecher's experimental second novel is that there was a town called Zatelsk where all but two people were taken into the woods and shot in a single afternoon. One of the survivors was a boy named Leyb, the other a girl named Gittl who lost a large family of siblings. Both wind up in 1930s Philadelphia, where Leyb meets an urbane Black man named Charles in a gay bar. Charles introduces young Leyb to the ways of the world and becomes close to Gittl as well. Included in the story are accounts of meetings between Charles and Gittl to discuss the particulars of his translation of her “mayseh,” such as what words should be capitalized, and whether "Kuren Smerti" (list of the dead) can be "oversat" (an anglification of iberzetzen, Yiddish for translated) or should be left in the original Ukrainian. There's also quite a bit of passionate sex, communism, and a long section recording Gittl's burial prayers for each of her 296 murdered townspeople. (With so many children among them, this has a particularly powerful resonance in the summer of 2022.) Part of a sentence describing Gittl's life in the "beforemayseh" gives a sense of Rothman-Zecher's invented language: "Hendl was halfawakebecome with Gittl's upsitting, what served her almost right for the way she had murmured in her sleep nearly the whole night, as in almost every and each night, spooling and unspooling phantasmagoric psalms as the moon glimpted over the dustvillage, trying vainishly to plug its earholes, yoh, but it could not for it was as though the moon's hands, wrought from stretches of nightsky, were tightfastened under a blanket of darkness, its starsiblings murmursome and blithely snorish all around it, no bowing or prostrating soever, and this is a good kind of badfeeling, how it is to be pinned by one's siblings' snortbreathing and sleepspeaking...."

Those who have the patience and receptivity required will be impressed and moved by this one-of-a-kind creation.