The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride. Riverhead Books (ISBN: 9780593422946), 2023.

Summary: A story centered around a grocery store in the midst of Pottstown’s Chicken Hill district, inhabited by immigrant Jews and the local Black community.

In 1972, a body is found at the bottom of a well, but swept away by Hurricane Agnes. In one sense the rest of this novel answers the question of how that body got there (and so I won’t). But this is a rich story about so much more, that all centers around a Jewish grocery, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. Jewish immigrants with a daughter Chona owned the store. She married a struggling theatre owner, Moshe Ludlow. Eventually Moshe figured out that the money was in Black acts, that the Black residents of Chicken Hill as well as surrounding areas would attend.

Chicken Hill was where those living on the margins, trying to get a toehold, lived–Blacks, immigrant Jews, and later, Latinos. Moshe and Chona lived above the store. While his theatres profited, the store lost money, mostly because Chona was generous with extending credit and slow to ask repayment. As more Jews moved away, Moshe wanted to join them but Chona refused. Today, we would call her a community activist. She was greatly loved, whether by the Jewish immigrants or Black residents, many of whom McBride introduces us.

Nate Timblin worked for Moshe, doing repairs. He had a dark past, according to rumors, but Moshe knows nothing of this. So when he asks Moshe and Chona to help a bright child deafened by a stove explosion to hide from white authorities who want to institutionalize him at Pennhurst, they agree. Dodo quickly becomes beloved by Chona, and a great help as she was weakened by periods of illness. This was not a child who needed institutionalization. They succeed until the town’s white doctor visits the store. Dodo defends her against an assault by the doctor, who flees only to return with the police, who take Dodo to Pennhurst, which is as horrible as all the rumors.

Nate and Addie, the woman he has been seeing, figure out what happened to Chona. And an amazing thing happens. Two communities touched by this evil act come together to rescue Dodo, honor Chona, and to get back at the city councilman, Gus Plitzka, who controls their water supply. And this underscores the larger context of this story. Pottstown is controlled by its white establishment. In these incidents, two ethnic communities, each in many ways self-contained, except by the generosity of Chona, come together to shrewdly resist the white establishment in plots with many moving parts. As kind of a dark counterpart to Chona, Nate chooses to risk all to deliver Dodo from the horrors of Pennhurst.

It’s not hard to see why this book has won numerous recognitions. McBride paints a rich portrait of these two communities that stand against white power and venality. We see two communities galvanized by attacks on an innocent boy and a generous and righteous woman. But all this was sown through years of care and generosity where heaven and earth met at a grocery store.