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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Plan your meeting
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store This or That
Answer in under three seconds. No wrong answers — only revealing ones.
1 / 40
Rapid fire (60 seconds)
Read these aloud as fast as the group can shout answers.
- 1. Grocery counter or Theater lobby?
- 2. Klezmer in a snowstorm or Jazz on Main Street?
- 3. Challah or Sweet tea?
- 4. Marbles in a pocket or A mezuzah on a chain?
- 5. Stay on the hill or Move downtown?
- 6. Credit slip or Cash only?
- 7. Gossip that helps or Silence that protects?
- 8. Lucky twelves or A clean ledger?
- 9. Pickle jar or Dance floor?
- 10. Paper bags or Playbills?