The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store: A Review

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride is a current bestseller and favorite of many book groups. The novel is a unique blend of literary fiction, historical fiction, and mystery. The tale weaves around a Jewish couple’s struggle and the Black community who unite to help them.

The story begins in Pottstown, PA in 1972 where a human skeleton is discovered at the local water reservoir. Who is it and why is a mezuzah found with the body? [A mezuzah is a small fixture affixed to the doorpost at the entrance to a Jewish home.] The novel then goes back to the 1930s where we meet a Dickensian cast of characters who inhabit the area of Chicken Hill, adjacent to the wealthier, white part of town. Chicken Hill is the home of those less fortunate: Black, Jewish, and immigrant communities. We meet Chona who, despite ill health, has inherited the small grocery store from her father and runs it to serve her community. She is courted by, and marries Moshe, who is struggling to run his small musical theatre. With Chona’s encouragement, Moshe opens the theatre to Black audiences, hiring struggling jazz musicians who come from far and near for a chance to perform.

But when a young, Black boy with special needs is orphaned, he is taken in by Addie and Nate, a Black couple who work for Chona. When the white authorities begin looking for young Dodo, Nate asks Moshe if he can hide Dodo in the basement of the theater so that the authorities will not be able to discover him. But Chona insists that Dodo stay at their house instead, and, with the help of her estranged friend from childhood, a woman named Bernice Davis, they work to keep Dodo hidden. But it all starts to go awry when the man from the state reaches out to the local physician, Doc Roberts, and plays on Roberts’ deep-seated racism and membership in the Ku Klux Klan to convince him to head to Chona’s store and find Dodo and place him in the hard, horrible Pennhurst Asylum. When Doc goes to the grocery store everything goes terribly wrong.

It’s at this point where all the fun begins; and we meet the heroic members of the Black and Jewish community who help rescue Dodo, while at the same time restore water that Gus Plitzer, a white city council member, has been siphoning town water away from the shul to water his dairy farm.

I know it sounds like I’ve given away the whole plot, but believe me, I have barely scratched the surface. The characters are many, beautifully woven together by McBride, and is so much fun to read. In a PBS News Hour interview, McBride said, “You have to really have a desire to see the good in people, to see them push past their boundaries.” “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” is a testament to a time when communities came together, helped each other, and cared about their neighbors. It is also a tale of love, romance, and social justice. And the best part is that throughout the book, you will laugh and maybe even cry as the backstories of each character is fully described and written with such warmth and care that you come away with feeling of satisfaction, comfort, and renewed faith in humanity.

James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His best-selling memoir, “The Color of Water,” published in 1996, is a homage to his Jewish mother. His 2013 novel, “The Good Lord Bird,” about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction and was made into a Showtime series. McBride has been a staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and The Washington Post, and his work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. He is also a jazz saxophonist and composer. In 2015, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America.”

Today’s post was written by Rhonda Rosen, programming and exhibitions librarian for the William H. Hannon Library.