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SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
A n asymptote is a line that approaches a given curve but
never touches it. On a graph, the mathematical concept
looks like two functions moving closer toward one another
but never quite meeting or intersecting.

For the past five years, Jewish author Moriel Rothman-Zecher has
had something of an asymptotic relationship with his grandmother.

In 2017, Rothman-Zecher, 33, began writing “Before All the World”
— his sophomore novel loosely based on his hidden family history —
within months of his grandmother’s death. In July, he moved from
Dayton, Ohio to West Philadelphia, just 20 blocks from where his
grandmother and her sister grew up on Cobbs Creek Parkway.

Rothman-Zecher is interested in both the malleability and pre-
cision of time, a seeming contradiction that he has woven through
“Before All the World,” published Oct. 11 by Farrar, Straus and
12 OCTOBER 27, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Giroux. The novel is grounded in his-
tory, but is fiction; it’s based on real
people and places Rothman-Zecher
wants to honor, though he admits that
at least one of the stories he based the
book on could have been apocrypha.

The Jerusalem-born author’s deep
curiosity about his Jewish roots and
connection to the places his family lived
— Israel, Ohio, Pennsylvania — are a
common theme in his writing. His 2018
debut novel “Sadness is a White Bird”
was a finalist for the National Jewish
Book Award and earned Rothman-
Zecher recognition on the National
Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list.

Rothman-Zecher teaches poetry and
fiction at the University of the Arts.

“I’m primarily a
novelist; I’m primar-
ily a storyteller, and
I’ve turned now —
for the last seven or
eight years — mostly
to fiction, in order to
tell the truth through
making things up,”
he said. “What I’m
most drawn to is the
truth of the story in
its kind of narrow
sense, in its kind of
spiritual sense, and
not necessarily its
factual sense.”
“Before All the
World” is set in
Prohibition-era Philadelphia in a time
when the word “pogrom” refers to both
the violence against Jews in Eastern
Europe and the violence against Black
people in America.

Leyb, a Jewish man, finds himself in
the city after escaping from the Eastern
European village of Zatelsk, where
most of the residents were taken to a
nearby forest and killed. At Crickets, a
speakeasy serving a mostly gay clien-
tele, Leyb meets Charles, a Black man
from Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward,
becoming fascinated with Charles’
ability to speak Yiddish, a language
Leyb has previously only thought to be
spoken by Jews.

Miraculously, Leyb also reunites
with Gittl, the other Jewish survivor
of the Zatelsk pogrom. The story of
unlikely survival of the three protago-
nists asks both the characters and the
readers to imagine a better world.

Though Zatelsk, Crickets and
Charles’ apartment addresses are fic-
tional locales, their coming together is
loosely based on real events.

Rothman-Zecher, who attends Kol
Tzedek, grew up very close with his
grandparents, but following the death
of his grandmother, he uncovered parts
of her life that were once hidden.

“We had really extensive, deep con-
versations about a lot of things. But also
in my early adulthood, I realized that
there were some subjects that had been
totally off-limits,” Rothman-Zecher
said. “Specifically, growing up, I had
thought that my grandmother had one
sister, Beatrice, who lived in Center
City for her whole life, and we would
visit her regularly. I think when I was
in my late teenage years, maybe early
20s, I realized that my grandma had
actually had two sisters.”
Rothman-Zecher’s grandmother’s
younger sister Leonore Steinberg
had a child with a Black man in the
1940s. Shortly after the child’s birth,
Steinberg was sent to a psychiatric hos-
pital, where she lived for the rest of her
life. The institution adopted her child.

Rothman-Zecher is unsure whether the
child was adopted for nefarious reasons
or whether Leonore was institution-
alized because her relationship with a
Black man was pathologized.

Rothman-Zecher also drew on a story
his grandfather once told him about
his experience at a speakeasy-turned-
gay bar, though Rothman-Zecher isn’t
entirely sure he remembered the story
correctly. As he tries his best to extract the
spiritual truth from his family’s sto-
ries, Rothman-Zecher has observed a
transformation in his relationship with
them. “Writing the book, researching the
book and living in the book and mov-
ing around the book was this opportu-
nity to be in conversation with people
who weren’t alive anymore,” he said.

“It has been a special feeling, to feel the
presence of my family members, both
literal and literary, as the book goes out
into the world.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Moriel Rothman-Zecher