Jinhee

“They produced a piece of jewelry, handed it to him, and asked what it was. A mezuzah, the old man said. It matches the one on the door, the cops said. Don’t these things belong on doors? The old man shrugged. Jewish life is portable, he said. The inscription on the back says “Home of the Greatest Dancer in the World.” It’s in Hebrew. You speak Hebrew? Do I look like I speak Swahili? Answer the question. You speak Hebrew or not? I bang my head against it sometimes.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“It’s the loneliest people who love books the most.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman is No Man

“Their fellow Pennsylvanians knew nothing about the shattered shtetls and destroyed synagogues of the old country; they had not set eyes on the stunned elderly immigrants starving in tenements in New York, the old ones who came alone, who spoke Yiddish only, whose children died or left them to live in charity homes, the women frightened until the end, the men consigned to a life of selling vegetables and fruits on horse-drawn carts. They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

“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.”
― James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store