Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
I think The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store will be my favorite book of the year. It’s so good!
It’s set in the small town of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, around 1936. Most of the main characters are Jewish or black and live in an area called “Chicken Hill.” The story kind of revolves around Chona, who marries Moshe. Here’s a small description of her.
Later that night [Moshe] took the matter to Chona. “What if I open my theater to the colored?”
“So?”
“The goyim won’t like that.”
Chona was standing at the stove cooking dinner, he back to him. She laughed and raised her spoon in the air, spinning it in a circle. That was her gift. Not an ounce of bitterness or shred of shame.
McBride dedicated the book to his friend Sy, who he tells the story of at the end of the book. In the dedication he wrote that his friend “taught all of us the meaning of Tikkun Olam.” Chona does that, too. Have you heard of Tikkun Olam? I think it’s such a beautiful teaching in the Jewish tradition. One source says, “In Jewish teachings, any activity that improves the world, bringing it closer to the harmonious state for which it was created.” It sounds like McBride’s friend embodied Tikkun Olam and the book doesn’t tell you that Chona is practicing Tikkun Olam; she just lives it. But as you see in the small passage above, she’s not a somber do-gooder; Chona is full of joy. She’s a fun and glorious character to get to know.
It’s so hard to write about books in a way that shows how good the story is. What can I say that makes you think you’d like a book enough to try it? I guess mostly you have to trust that if I like it, you will, too. The best way to do that is to try it, right? I’ve realized that we can be wildly different in what we like. Once, I recommended a movie to my friends, and when they watched it, they said they looked at each other and asked, “What was Mavis thinking?” And I’ve experienced that, too. Over time, though, I’ve grown to be confident in some friends and reviewers whose taste I trust. Once in a while there’s a miss, but overall I trust them enough to give the book, movie or whatever a try. If you have even a little bit of that trust in me, try this book.
I also write these book reviews/blogs for myself. I am very forgetful, and it’s helpful to remember which books I have and haven’t read, what they were about, and why I liked them or did not like them.
Kind of like photos of a travel blog, here are a couple passages I liked.
[Moshe invites a band to his theater for a dance and it gathers a crowd.] “He had never seen so many Jews in one place in America in his life.”
“A handsome young Hasid in a caftan and fur hat, bearing a gunny sack, his curly hair jammed into the hat he wore cocked to the side as if it were a fedora, announced he had come all the way from Pittsburgh and would not dance with a woman at all, which caused laughter and a few harsh words, some of them in German, about Polish morons dressing like greenhorns.
Moshe was flummoxed . “Why come to a dance if you’re not going to dance with a womman?” he asked the man.
“I’m not looking for a dancer,” the handsome Hasid said tersely, “I’m looking for a wife.”
The crowd laughed again. Later, under the spell of Katz’s gorgeous musical wizardry, Moshe watched in wonder as the man danced like a demon all night. He frolicked through every dance step that Moshe had ever seen, and Moshe, who had spent his childhood as a fusgeyer—a wandering Jew—in Romania, had seen a few: horas, bulgars, khosidls, freylekhs, Russian marches, Cossack high-steps. The Hasid was a wonder of twisted elbows, a rhythmic gyroscope of elastic grace and wild dexterity.” (p.10, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, Riverhead Books, New York, 2023.)
Can’t you just see it? This is how we are introduced to Malachi, who becomes a significant character and is, in fact, the old man in the very beginning, who I quote in my list of 2024 books.
[As I wrote earlier, most of the story takes place in a part of Pottstown called “Chicken Hill.”]
“[Fatty] had never been to Hemlock Row, a tiny hamlet of black life that most Chicken Hill blacks avoided. Chircken Hill’s Negroes were, by their own definition, “on-the-move,” “moving-on-up,” “climb-the-tree,” “NAACP-type” Negroes, wanting to be American. But the Blacks who lived in this clump of tiny shacks spread over two acres just off the road heading west towards Berks County had no desire to be in the white man’s world. They were Lowgods, said to be from South Carolina, all related in some form or fashion…The Lowgoods were private, suspicious, unpredictable, tended their own animals, and kept their own counsel. They walked different. They talked different. Their language was odd, full of lilting phrases that pelted the ground like raindrops. Gullah-speak, they called it—half English and half African—full of hoodoo sayings and things that only the Lowgoods understood. They were also not to be fooled with.” (p. 296, Ibid.)
I wanted to write that you learn a lot about different races, like Blacks and Jewish people and the white townspeople, but that sounded like the book would be preachy or something. I hope the samples above show you how you learn about them, but it’s not preachy. Great story, great setting, great writing, great characters. Enjoy!