The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The book we are introducing today is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, published in 2023.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is about the intertwining lives of African American, Jewish, immigrant, and white residents in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, largely taking place in the 1920’s and 30’s.  Here is how its publishers describe it:

«In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to discover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood 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 and Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighbourhood’s quirky collection of blacks and European migrants, helped by her husband, a Romanian-born theatre owner who integrated the town’s first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalised, 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.»

Music played
Excerpts from:

• 1930’s dance music  (From Dancing Mashup 1930’s Style video on You Tube with dance sequences from 1930’s films – worth a watch if you like this type of dancing)
• Mazel Tov Dances – Klesmer music played by Mickey Katz and his band.
• I Got Rhythm played by Chick Webb and his band.

This month’s book recommendations from Reading Circle members

• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery – A French Concierge deliberately conceals her intelligence to keep her job.  Translated from the French original.
• Bloody Sunday: Truth, Lies and the Saville Enquiry by Douglas Murray – a review of the events of an infamous day during the Northern Ireland troubles.
• Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz – deals with college admissions in the USA.
• Yellowface by R.F. Kuang – An unsuccessful writer takes over a manuscript from a friend who has died.  A satire of racial diversity in the publishing industry.
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray – a literary classic about an opportunistic young woman’s life in Regency England.
• Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury – Magical realism: summer as experienced by a young boy in the Mid-West of the USA.
• Plato and Platypus Walk Into A Bar by Thomas Wilson Cathcart and Daniel Martin Klein – Understanding philosophy through jokes.
• Paradisestraße by Sina Kiyani – Gay 17/18-year-olds in Iran. In German.
• Antarctica: Short Stories by Claire Keegan.
• Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens by  Michael Kumpfmüller – about the last love of Franz Kafka. In German.
• Pearl by Simon Armitage – Translation of a late 14th century poem about grief, thought to be by the same poet who wrote Gawain and the Green Knight.
• Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary by Traudl Junge, edited by Melissa Mueller – Traudl’s life while working for Hitler from 1942 to 1945.

Do join us again next month when we will be introducing Victory City by Salman Rushdie.