Our book of the month is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. This book was published in 2023 and it seemed to be everywhere. It was a NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Readers pick for 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY. Winner OF THE 2024 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRIZE FOR AMERICAN FICTION. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE. And, ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023. Linny says she printed out a list of characters and it had 80 characters listed! There is a lot going on in this book. This book is set in our home state of Pennsylvania. The book opens in 1972 when Hurricane Agnes has washed away evidence of an ages-past murder. Workers, digging the foundations for a new development, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Nancy: Danez Smith, in a review for the New York Times, calls this book, “A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel.” Nancy asks Linny whether she agrees with this review. Linny says, no, because she forgot about the murder, partly because Nancy interrupted her reading as we have reshuffled books over the last couple months! Nancy also doesn’t really see the book as a murder mystery. While she did remember the murder at the beginning, she was more engaged in what felt like a collection of stories about people in the neighborhood. Linny wonders who the protagonist is among all these characters. Nancy says she thinks that once we meet Dodo, his and Chona’s stories become the main stories of the novel. Linny wonders who the antagonist is. Nancy thinks Doc Roberts and his representation of bigotry. Linny thought racism and prejudice also were antagonists. Nancy notes that the book opens with Hurricane Agnes and the book also ends with us learning that one of the main characters died, in the South, on the day the Hurricane hit PA. Linny missed that Dodo dies the same day of the hurricane. Nancy reads a passage about Dodo: “…he was not Dodo of Pottstown but rather Nate Love II, the father of three boys and two girls. Nane was not the very last Love after all. There would be more. They surrounded him as he died, his children and their children. He died on June 22, 1972, the same day Hurricane Agnew wiped much of Pottstown off the face of the earth and day after an old Jew named Malachi the Magician vanished forever from the hills of southeastern Pennsylvania.” Nancy asks Linny what she thought the symbolism of Dodo dying on the day the hurricane hit Pottstown was. Linny says she didn’t know but she was happy about Dodo’s happy ending. Nancy things the symbolism may be that the hurricane is a cleansing force: washing away the evidence of old divisions and hate. But it also punishes the elite and spares Chicken Hill. Linny had forgotten about Dodo and Monkey Pants meeting in heaven. Nancy reads that section: “And as he faded to eternal slumber, surrounded by loved ones, just feet from the sunflowers and summer moss that had helped wipe away the tumult of his first twelve years of life, he would offer four words in his final murmurings that were forever a puzzle to all that knew and loved him and surrounded him in his final moments of life, save for one who was not there, who was far beyond them all, now living in the land where the lame walked and the blind could see, who awaited him even at that moment as he drifted upward, eager to hear the news of the many adventures that had befallen him since they’d parted ways. It was to him that he spoke, not to them. He called out… ‘Thank you, Monkey Pants.’” Linny cries. Nancy says she remembers Hurricane Agnes. She and Linny were living in Hummelstown at the time. Nancy looked up some statistics about Agnes. Agnes’ damage was heaviest in PA and was the costliest hurricane to hit the US at the time. It was June 1972 and in Harrisburg the Susquehanna River crested at over 33 feet where flood stage is only at 17 feet. On June 24, 680 billion gallons of water flowed through Harrisburg compared to a normal day when the river carries only 23 billion gallons. Throughout PA, Agnes resulted in the destruction of 71,000 structures, $2 billion in damage, and 48 deaths. Linny remembers our basement was flooded and we had to boil the water. She also remembers having to go out in the alley to fill the pan with water and dump it into the toilet tank to be able to flush it. She was also worried that our father would be electrocuted in the basement. She remembers splashing in puddle. She remembers the musty smell of everything put on the curb. Our town had a curfew and you had to show you were a resident to get back in. Nancy remembers their little creek was so high and fast. Nancy remembers their brother lost his green army men when the basement drained. She remembers their father took a lot of gym flooring that was being thrown out. Nancy was struck that there are so many characters with disabilities. Then, she watched an interview with James McBride and he said he feels this book is a book about children with disabilities. When he started writing this book, he thought he would write about a camp he worked at as a college student one summer. It was a summer camp for kids with disabilities established by a Romanian Jewish theatre owner. McBride said after writing many chapters, he realized the story was really about the Jewish theatre owner and what may have brought him to establish a camp and that’s where the fictional story took off. Linny was not struck by the prevalence of characters with disabilities because a lot of people have disabilities and a lot of people with disabilities ended up in asylums. Nancy points out some of the characters with disabilities: • Chona: crippled from polio, but harbors “not an ounce of bitterness or shred of shame” and can’t have children, some sort of chronic illness. • Doc Roberts: crippled from polio but bitter and ashamed of his disability. • Dodo: deaf from an exploding oven • Monkey Pants: cerebral palsy • Chick Webb: a talented musician despite being a “hunchback” • Inmates at Pennhurst who have a variety of physical, emotional, and mental disabilities. Linny thinks another theme in this book is about the ways we separate ourselves from other based on race/ethnicity/class: • Jews: Romanian, Hungarian, German • Blacks: Northern, Southern and formerly enslaved, Lowgod • Jews vs Blacks vs Whites who all seem to think they are Mayflower descendants • Poor vs rich Nancy thought McBride gave us some beautiful portrayals of friendship that bridged these differences: • Chona and Bernice • Dodo and Monkey Pants • Chona with all the Blacks who Moshe would find at the end of the day, chatting on her doorstep • Fatty (Black) and Big Soap (Italian) • Moshe and Malachi Linda’s favorite relationship was that between Paper and Miggy. They were respected women in their neighborhood and a glue in the community. Nancy thought it was interesting that the whites in the book were mostly ignorant of blacks who held status in the community – they were simply another black person. Even Moshe doesn’t understand Nate’s reputation in the black community. Linda notes that Nancy and she grew up in the North and were taught that the North was a place of equality. James McBride contests this rosy view of the north: “The difference was that the white man in the South spoke his hatred in clear, clean, concise terms, whereas the white man in the new country hid his hatred behind stories of wisdom and bravado, with false smiles of sincerity and stories of Jesus Christ and other nonsense that he tossed about like confetti in the Pottstown parade.” Linny says this reminds her of Trevor Noah’s BORN A CRIME when he says he prefers the explicit prejudice of South Africa over the “hidden” racism in America. Nancy thinks McBride is clever in having Nate and Dodo go back South for safety. Nancy’s favorite character was Chona who is the loving bridge among many of the residents. She operates the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, at a loss, because she allows people to run up tabs and never pay. She writes letters to the editor against the KKK. Her husband, Moshe, becomes successful and wants to move off the Hill like other successful Jews have done. When Moshe repeatedly suggests this to Chona, this is their typical conversation: “‘Moshe, I like it here. I grew up in this house. The postman knows where I live.’ Exasperated, Moshe pointed out the kitchen window toward Pottstown below. ‘Down the hill is America!’ But Chona was adamant. ‘America is here.’” Linny’s favorite character was Nate. He is extremely loyal. He was loyal to his mom, his wife, and Dodo. At first, she thought Nate was too passive, but he risks everything to rescue Dodo. Nancy has one last question, she’s been dying to ask Linny and that is what she thought about Malachi. We meet him in the opening chapter where he is the last Jew left on Chicken Hill. But we meet him in the 1920s where he arrives at Moshe's dance hall from another town to find a wife at Moshe’s Mickey Katz show. Malachi says he won’t dance. Ends up dancing all night and is the best dancer anyone has ever seen. He leaves town immediately after the show but reappears 12 years later, at which time he befriends Moshe. He opens a bakery and works hard to achieve financial stability, but his food is just bad. He returns to Europe for a little while because he has stated he has no desire to assimilate to American culture. He refuses to speak disparagingly of his old life, and in many ways seems to have been happier in Europe except that the rise of the Nazi Party is posing a direct threat to Jewish people’s safety there in the late 1930s. Malachi returns to America shortly after Chona’s death and he comforts Moshe as Moshe closes up the Heaven & Earth. Along with Chona, Malachi most pointedly highlights the failures and problems of American society. He almost seemed like a mythical character to me. Linny thinks it’s interesting that Malachi is also the last book of the Old Testament and therefore, it is a book of prophecy that the world is in transition. Like a lot of immigrants who left good lives and respect in their old world, they ended up scratching their way from nothing in the new country. They sacrificed for their descendants. Linny cries. On the next episode, we will welcome Erica Slason to the front porch to talk more about THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE. Erica is an archivist at the Historical Society of Montgomery County. Pottstown is in Montgomery County. Erica has written about the historical Pottstown portrayed in THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE.