The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: Novel and Lessons from the Past

 

 

 

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 20^th 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

 

 

 

 

Ivory Vikings: Mystery of the Lewis Chessmen

 

 

 

 

 Ivory Vikings (2015)

By Nancy Marie Brown

St. Martin’s Press, 236 pages +  back matter

★★★

 

The first thing to know is encapsulated in this book’s long subtitle: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them. Those game pieces would be the Lewis Chessmen discovered on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis in1831, but were probably carved in the 12^th century. In all, 78 pieces were found; 67 reside in the British Museum and 11 in the Scottish National Museum in Edinburgh. There are enough for two complete sets, with the extras indicating missing pieces. For those who’ve never played chess, there are 32 pieces in a set; the designs on the Lewis Chessmen suggest as many as four sets once existed. 

 

Two bishops, Edinburgh

King and queen, Edinburgh

Rook and knight, London

 

 

The second thing to know is that when I commented on Facebook I had seen the pieces in both London and Edinburgh, three different people told me I should read Ivory Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown. When I made the further confession that I took an MA in medieval history and once read a lot of Norse mythology and sagas, several more friends said I had to read it. I can now say without fear of contradiction that it has been a long, long time between what I once studied and now! 

 

Brown’s book is well-researched and comes at the chess pieces from four major vantage points: her command of Norse and Icelandic languages, archaeological and art history perspectives, feminism, and playing chess. My three-star rating is partly a warning that this is undoubtedly an academic book, albeit an impressive one. I once read translated sagas from famed Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) and even visited his home in Reykholt, but Icelandic is allegedly one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn. Brown knows it so well she can cite ways in which it has been mistranslated. In other words, I take Brown’s word on such matters.

 

Ivory Vikings shook a few cobwebs of names of Scandinavian heroes, scoundrels, explorers, holy men, and usurpers whose very names once thrilled me: Canute, Eirik Bloodaxe, Haakon the Old, Ethelred the Unready, Saint Thorlak, Harald Hardrada…. Brown reminds readers that Vikings were from the mythologized figures of Wagner operas. To be sure, Norsemen raided coastal towns and often took no quarter doing so. Yet, by 1100 most were so thoroughly Christianized that they could be bought off instead of looting, Iceland had a bishop, and one Svein Asleisfarson was considered the “last” Viking when he died in 1171. 

 

 

 

If you try wading through Ivory Vikings it’s helpful to acknowledge that your geography skills have been skewed by looking at flat Mercator projection maps. Despite what a few loonies might tell you, our planet is a 3D sphere, not a flat map. Not to lessen the scale of Viking voyages, but if a crew sailed from Norway, Scotland was closer than England, Iceland was closer than Ireland, and from Iceland was a hop to Greenland, and a skip to Newfoundland where the 11^th century settlement of L’Anse aux meadows once stood. Who thinks of Greenland? Answer: Norsemen, Icelanders, Scots, and Picts. The Lewis chess pieces were carved from walrus ivory and Greenland was a good place get it.

 

Celts, Norwegians, and Icelanders all claim to have carved the Lewis chessmen. Brown comes down on the side of Iceland and a skilled carver known as Margaret the Adroit, around 1200 AD. She was married to Thorir, a priest who assisted Bishop Páll Jónsson in Skálholt, the center of Icelandic Christianity. Wait! Did I say married priest? Yes, Icelandic Catholic priests married until 1139, and thereafter the practice continued on the sly. The relative power of Scandinavian women explains how Margaret acquired artisanal skills and renown. Her work on bishop’s croziers and other religious objects makes her the prime candidate for chess pieces, some of which might have been intended as a gift to an archbishop. It remains a mystery how they ended up on Lewis, who put them there, or why.  

 

 

Not every scholar agrees the pieces were made in Iceland or that Margaret carved them. Maybe that’s ex post facto sexism. You’ll learn a lot about the game of chess in Brown’s book, including the fact that the queen was once the weakest piece on the board and could only move slantwise.* The strongest? Bishops! The coolest? My vote goes to the shield-biting rooks who were surely berserkers.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Queens gained chess power courtesy of Isabella of Castille.