Join us for a discussion of "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store" by James McBride.
Book Summary: In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of Black people and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a Black Deaf child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents — roused by Chona's kindness and the courage of a local Black worker named Nate Timblin — banded together to keep the boy safe.
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