In the swirl of Prohibition-era Philadelphia, 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 to hear his native tongue spoken by this beautiful Black man from the Seventh Ward whose life he will come to share. Leyb is haunted by memories from before he came to America, growing up in the shtetl of Zatelsk, where one day every last person, except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and he himself, was taken to the forest and killed. Flowing with a surge of language and synchrony, Gittl and Leyb are reunited, surrounded by the murmur of angelic voices and together with Charles they each grapple with how to face, and sieze, whatever future lies ahead. Carried along by questions of survival and hope, Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way, 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?
