The Marsha Razin z”l Book & Film Club will meet December 16 at 7:30 p.m. to discuss The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was 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. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community – heaven and earth – that sustain us.
Our Book and Film Club is open to all interested adults in the area. All meetings and materials are in English. The meetings will be held on the second Monday of each month, unless otherwise indicated. When are discussing a book, the meeting will start at 7:30 p.m. When we watch a film, the meeting will start at 7:15 p.m.
We wish we could tell you where all the meetings will take place – at the Library or on Zoom, but as you know, nothing right now can be predicted, so we’ll be taking the location month by month for a while.
A 10 NIS donation is requested when films are shown.
The next meeting will be January 13, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. to discuss Button Man by Andrew Gross.
See the full 2024-25 lineup here.