The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store : a novel
(Audiobook CD)

Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Title from container.

Read by Dominic Hoffman.

"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new 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 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 blacks 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 deaf black 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. It becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town's establishment played in both, [it] shows that it is love and community -- heaven and earth -- that ultimately sustain us"-- Provided by publisher.

AUDIOBOOK CD