The Storied Life A J Fikrey

 Gabrielle Zevin has written a delightful sweet story about a bookstore owner. The Storied Life of A J Fikrey, follows the widower book seller as he adjusts to the loss of his wife, the love of his life.  He had fallen in love and moved to Alice Island where she grew up and they opened a bookstore there. 

It is a ferry ride away from the mainland and relies on the tourist trade for their largest profits. Now he is depressed, drowning his sorrows in liquor and hoping to retire with the sale of a first edition Edgar Allen Poe book he found at a garage sale.  

Then the book is stolen and a baby girl is left in his store.  These two events completely change the course of his life. He must stay and continue to run the bookstore.  He cannot bring himself to send the little two year old girl over to the foster system.  He decides to keep her and bring her up as his own.  

All these changes in his life also change him.  He becomes a much more pleasant person.  Making friends, loving Maya, the child.  He even will be open to finding love again.  OF course there is a side story of his sister in aw who is in a terrible marriage.  The police chief becomes a reader and friend, he also had a bad marriage.

Such a wonderful examination of relationships, how to be a friend, a parent and  a good lover.  How to take care of yourself and change to the best you.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

 

This month I read a book that was written by the author, James McBride, who explains that he is the child of a black Reverend father and a white Jewish mother, whose family sat shiva for her when she married.

His first book was The Color of Water, which told the story of his upbringing as a mixed race child in a large family.  This time McBride brings us a novel which looks the horrible truths about race and prejudice squarely in the face.  He adds some beautiful prose that brings humor and offers the reader hope.

This novel takes the story of the Jewish immigrant in the 1920s who came to the United States and settled in the South, opening a grocery or dry goods store.  These Jews lived shoulder to shoulder with their Black neighbors.  This is the story of one little town, Pottstown, PA that is home to Moshe Ludlow and his wife, Chona, who live above the Heaven and Earth Grocery store.  Chona grew up in the store and continues to run the store after her marriage,  Moshe manages the Jewish Theater and brings in both klezmer music and then books the popular Black performer swing artist , Chick Webb.  The Jewish families are move off the Chicken Hill neighborhood to the center of town, changing the dynamics of the area.   Chona refuses to leave and the author explains,”Chona, for her part, saw them not as Negroes but as neighbors”

So Moshe and Chona stay and live side by side with their neighbors, when Chona is asked to hide Dodo, young black child who is deaf and thought to be dumb, after being in an accident with his mother.  Now the authorities are looking to take him away to an institution and Chona agrees to hide him.  She becomes quite attached to him and puts her own life at risk to save his.  

Chona had never been one to play by the rules of American society. She did not experience the world as most people did. To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don’t touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul.”

When things go wrong and Dodo is taken away the townspeople and Moshe work together to get Dodo back from the horrific conditions in the state hospital.  The various characters in the book overcome the class and color divide to rescue Dodo.

This is a story of race, religion and color blindness.  It is the story of the immigtrant Jews from the shtels of Europe and their effort to find the American dream.  It is the story of coming together,  finding our common ground and seeing that despite all our differences we can live side by side.

McBride says in an interview, “What I tried to do in this book is show how people simply excused a lot of those differences, set them aside for the moment, and got to the business of finding the meal that would feed us all. I just wanted to show in this book that we have gotten along very well. We have got to stick together and deal with the reality of where we are. We’re in deep water, and we will end up in deeper water if we don’t pay attention.”

This novel shares a message that  is so relevant for the times we are now living in.