The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (2023)
By James McBride
Penguin Random House, 400 pages.
★★★★★
A funny thing happened on the way to a potential Pulitzer Prize: James McBride was riding high on the bestseller list with The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. It won the Kirkus Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, was shortlisted for other prizes, and got an endorsement from Barack Obama. Then, in 2024, Percival Everett released the magnificent novel James, which seems destined for greater things.
Nonetheless, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a wonderful and imaginative work. Anyone who can make Pottstown, Pennsylvania seem exotic is one heck of a writer. It is a future-back-to-the-past novel that opens in 1972, when a skeleton and mezuzah are unearthed at a construction project. Hurricane Agnes washes the site clean of CSI material, so local police ask an old Jewish woman living in an abandoned synagogue in the former Chicken Hill district if she can help. She, Malachi, is our window to the past.
Pennsylvania boroughs like Pottstown were once vibrant steel and iron manufacturers. McBride takes us back to the 1920s and 30s when its Chicken Hill neighborhood was a lively mix of Jewish and African-American citizens. A bit of history helps explain. Sadly, new immigrants to America are often viewed as outcasts. The early 20th century was marred by anti-immigrant xenophobia to such a degree that many white Americans questioned if Jews (especially those from Eastern Europe) were white. Jews were cofounders of the NAACP and allied with African Americans at a time in which the Ku Klux Klan was in resurgence and was anti-Semitic as well as racist.
Chicken Hill parallels James McBride’s family history. His father was African American, and his mother a Romanian Jewish immigrant. The novel’s titular grocery store was run by Moshe and Chona Ludlow. It was losing money, but Moshe kept it open so that Chona, who was stricken by polio, had something to do. She was assisted by employee/friend Nate Timlin, but it was Moshe’s dance hall that brought the money in. They put on big shows for Jews and blacks alike.
What a neighborhood it was! To call it colorful, is to undersell the cast of characters in the McBride's novel. Anytime someone wanted to hear gossip or news they went to an African American woman nicknamed “Paper,” and local residents bonded over their distrust of authority figures. So many Jews flowed in and out of the Hill that when Malachi, a dancer, appeared Moshe wracked his brain to recall meeting her 12 years earlier. Alas, given the tenor of the times, the Klan and other racists constantly brought grief to Chicken Hill. The local doctor, Roberts, was a Klansman that Chicken Hill residents tried to avoid. Like most “whites,” Roberts had his office downtown, which was literally down from Chicken Hill. When Nate asked Chona to hide Dodo, a 12-year-old orphan, from Roberts and state officials, she tried to do so. Everyone knew that Dodo, a deaf and dumb black child, would be shipped to Pennhurst, an asylum for “imbeciles.”
The view of Pennhurst from the inside is a Dickensian nightmare, and the story of a young inmate called “Monkey Pants” will break your heart. Perhaps, however, you will be cheered by a cockamamie plot to liberate one of the inmates. McBride has a gift for leavening terrible things with humor. Likewise, he uses unusual props such a marbles and a water pipe to bring into close focus the dynamics of social class in 1920s and ‘30s.
Of course, the 1930s was also the decade of the Great Depression. Those Jews with resources slowly began to move downtown until Moshe and Chona were one of the last Jewish families on decaying Chicken Hill. In a moment reminiscent of the film Big Night, Moshe dared hope a big show could change their fortunes. Eventually the dance hall closed, Moshe and Chona grew old, and Chicken Hill (now gone) declined. Those who have studied sociology recognize this as a classic pattern of how ghettos emerge.
Full confession: I visited Pottstown numerous times in the 1970s on my way to Philadelphia. I knew nothing of Chicken Hill before reading this novel. It is another thing that makes this such a fine book; it’s a work of fiction, but also one of remembrance and history.
Rob Weir
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