Literary Fiction · Free kit
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, workers digging on Chicken Hill in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well — and a mezuzah that does not belong with a body. James McBride winds the story back to the 1920s and '30s, when Jewish immigrants and African Americans shared the hill, Moshe Ludlow booked jazz into his theater, and Chona Ludlow kept the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store open as the neighborhood's stubborn heartbeat. When the state comes for Dodo, a Deaf boy in Nate and Addie Timblin's care, the hill has to decide what a neighbor is worth. Funny, crowded, and unsparing about who America protects.
“To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don't touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world.”
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store Icebreakers
Answer in under 30 seconds. These connect to the book’s themes without spoiling the story.
Personality Reveal
1. Are you the neighbor who brings food when someone is sick, or the neighbor who quietly fixes the thing nobody asked you to fix?
Personality Reveal
2. When a group is deciding whether to stay put or move on, do you argue for the old block or start packing?
Personality Reveal
3. Do you keep other people's secrets like a vault, or do you consider yourself a 'public information service' with good intentions?
Funny & Light
4. What food from your childhood still tastes like a whole neighborhood, even if it was never that good?
Funny & Light
5. What's the most useless item you would still stock if you ran a tiny corner store, just because one regular would riot without it?
Funny & Light
6. What's a superstition you claim not to believe — and still obey, just in case?
Would You Rather
7. Would you rather be known as the person who always stays and helps, or the person who made it out and sends money back?
Would You Rather
8. Would you rather live where everyone knows your family's business, or where nobody would notice if you disappeared for a week?
Would You Rather
9. Would you rather be underestimated your whole life and left alone, or correctly estimated and never left alone?
Hot Take
10. Hot take: a neighborhood gossip does more practical good than a neighborhood official. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
11. Hot take: "I'll help you, but I don't want to get involved" is not actually help. Agree or disagree?
Hot Take
12. Finish this sentence: 'The people who count as my people are ______ — and I know that is incomplete.'
Personal Connection
13. Who in your life has treated you as a neighbor when they had every social excuse not to?
Personal Connection
14. What's one skill or way of communicating you have that people regularly miss because it doesn't look like theirs?
Personal Connection
15. What's a place — a store, a kitchen, a stoop — that felt like the center of a world when you were growing up?