| Title | The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store |
| Author | James McBride |
| Copyright | 2023 |
| Type | Fiction |
| Length | 400 Pages |
| Finished Reading | February 27, 2024 |
| Notable | Named book of the year by Fresh Air, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and Time Magazine. Winner of the 2024 Jewish Fiction Award A NY Times notable book |
| Ratings | Personal: 3 stars GoodReads: 4.1 Stars (311,365 ratings) Amazon: 4.4 Stars (49547 ratings) |
Oh what a beautiful, powerful novel.
Before we start, I want to make a comment about the language. This book covers the time period of the 1920s and 1930s. People at that time used the word “Negro” when talking about Blacks. While this term is rude and offensive today, it was commonly used in the early 20th century and is prevalent in this novel. So I’m letting the word stand in the quotes I include. (I would never use that other word, quotes or not). I hope it doesn’t offend.
This novel focuses on the Black and Jewish communities in a small Pennsylvania town of the 1930. Both of these outcast communities are wary of one another and suffer with one another. The local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan is lead by the town doctor.
Moshe, the owner of a dance hall, opens it to Blacks. If the Jews and Blacks are having fun it gets the attention of the whites in town.
The dances are Negroes from far and wide, and over the next twelve months, [Moshe’s] fortunes grew. As the did, the responses of the town’s rival theater owners evolved from grumbles to murmured complaints to roaring outrage. Negroes were crawling all over downtown, the howled, to a Jewish theater! Everybody knows the Jews bake their matzahs with Christian blood! The response was swift. First the city building inspector arrived at the theater and told Moshe his pipes were bad and that his plaster was peeling, and fined him. The owner of the theater building complained able the litter. The fire commissioner cited him for creaky doorways and missing emergency exits. Even his own synagogue fine him five dollars.”
Page 21
Chona, Moshe’s wife, also reaches to work with the Blacks by serving them from their grocery store. Although her husband wants to move off Chicken Hill where the two communities futures are limited, Chona will have none of it.
“But Chona was adamant. ‘America is here.’ ‘This area is poor. Which we are not. It is Negro. Which we are not. We are doing well!’ ‘Because we serve, you see? That is what we do. The Talmud says it. We must serve.'”
Page 27
Before long, a deaf young Black boy is being hunted by the whites to put him into a state hospital. Chona helps, then later enlists Berniece’s help. Bernice and Chona were fast childhood friends who fell apart but was happy to be of service and put those scores behind them.
I don’t want to go further to be sure I don’t spoil the plot; let me just say I had to put the book down for a couple of weeks because I couldn’t bear another novel of a child in danger. But I went back to it and am glad I did. (The novel has a happy ending).
While the two communities don’t officially unite in public there are multiple parallels of Blacks and Jews working together to help those in need. At one point they find themselves together…
There was nowhere to sit, no coffee to drink, no kind Presbyterian minister to offer words of solace. They just stood uncomfortably as the odd clump of Americans they were: Jews and [B]lacks, standing together.”
Page 224
James McBride’s prose is beautiful. We get right down to the hearts and minds of the people. Describing Bernice,
“[Chona] realized, looking at Bernice, that something inside her had turned off in some kind of way, like a water fixture closed tightly or a lamp that refused to light.”
Page 104
Using another metaphor of water and fire the author describes an important figure of the novel.
“Nate’s eyes glowed eerily. Fatty saw it then. Saw what the men saw. Nate Love, beaming in from another world, his eyes calm and intense, brimming with calcified white-hot rage. Fatty felt as if he were looking at a volcano covered by a clear lake.
Page 179
In another place McBride uses a rugged simile to describe a man:
“His face looked like he had a hobby of stepping on rakes.”
Page 215
“The Lowgods”, is an intense chapter showing us a group of Blacks – even further down the social ladder – whom the Chicken Hill community asks for help in helping “Dodo”, the child in danger. After I finished this chapter I was so glad I’m a reader of fiction.
Writing this, I can’t capture the power of the story; perhaps my summary is incomplete, too long, too disjointed, or a combination of the three, plus more. Just read the novel; and leave a comment when you are done.