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"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."--… (más)
Jews and African Americans resided in Pottstown's Chicken Hill. A Jewish woman who operated the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store treated everyone fairly. That was not always the case with everyone in the area, particularly with the area's doctor. We see how Chona, the Jewish woman, made a lasting impact on the people she encountered. The well-drawn characters brought the story to life. Included in the story is the plight of an African-ancestored boy who was deaf but definitely not dumb. We also see the sad state of asylums at that time. Sometimes you had to laugh at the ingenuity of this group of people. ( )
So many well-drawn characters! Such a colorful glimpse into communities. Add in deft weaving of multiple story lines. I was interested from the start, but it drew me in more and more as it progressed ... the point where I almost forgot the mystery that started it all.
What a storyteller! McBride’s book is about the history of African American and Jewish residents in Chicken Hill a neighbourhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. It’s one of those books where finding a flaw is virtually impossible, it’s not only an extraordinary story but the writing is superb. Wisely, I chose the audio version with a fabulous reading by Dominic Hoffman. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
To Sy Friend, who taught all of us the manning of Tikkun Olam
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew's house was the first place they went to.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The old man shrugged. Jewish life is portable, he said. (p. 3)
The Negroes of Chicken Hill loved Chona. They saw her not as a neighbor but as an artery to freedom, for the recollection of Chona's telltale limp as she and her childhood friend, a tall, gorgeous, silent soul named Bernice Davis, walked down the pitted mud roads of the Hill to school each morning was stamped in their collective memory. It was proof of the American possibility of equality: we all can get along no matter what, look at those two. (p. 31)
She felt the prayer more than heard it; it started from somewhere deep down and fluttered toward her head like tiny flecks of light, tiny beacons moving like a school of fish, continually swimming away from a darkness that threatened to swallow them (p. 218)
They moved slowly like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or eru West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them - Isaac, Nate, and the rest - into a future of American nothing. (p. 225)
Chona wasn't one of them. She was the one among them who ruined his hate for them, and for that he resented her. (p. 237)
He had spent his entire adult life running, ever since he was thirteen -just past Dodo's age - for he was thirteen when he, too, had experienced his own accident, his own explosion. Not from a stove, but from a father who had dragged his family from the perilous Low Country of South Carolina to the promised land of Pennsylvania only to discover that despite living on Hemlock Row among the peaceful Lowgods, justice and freedom had as little currenca in the new land as it had in the old. (p. 353)
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
"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."--
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