The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

I love the humanity McBride finds in his characters, an intriguing and heart-warming prospect for me always. Once more, he delivers.

The story examines the human relationships between Jewish immigrants and African Americans in Depression Era Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Adding an unexpected dimension that elevated the story for me, it culminated in a community-orchestrated, nail-biting rescue of a handicapped African-American child from Pennhurst Asylum, a notorious snake pit.

I fell in love with James McBride’s writing when I read his memoir, The Color of Water, many years ago.

McBride is biracial, the son of a white Jewish mother and an African American father. He draws on his heritage in this book, creating a vibrant picture of life in 1920s and 30s Pennsylvania, with a Jewish couple who own The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store in a Pottstown neighborhood that is becoming increasingly African American. The community comes together to keep a deaf Black boy from being institutionalized. As the white mother of two Black sons, I resonate… show more.

I love James McBride’s novels because he so clearly loves the wide, noisy universe of characters that he creates—complicated, loving, scared, brash, generous, self-centered, deeply religious, happily law-skirting, and (occasionally) nasty people from almost all backgrounds, each with a vivid personality and backstory.

Plus, McBride sure knows how to write a page-turning plot. (I confess that my head was spinning a bit from all the twists in this story, which centers around a hardscrabble neighborhood’s effort to rescue a deaf, orphaned, 12-year-old boy from a Dickensian mental institution.)

For the few hours that I spent in this world, my faith… show more.

I stayed up late and spent the weekend reading what I think is the most accomplished of James McBride’s books. 

The son of a Jewish mother and an African American minister, his lived experience gives him an authentic understanding of the Jewish immigrants and poor African Americans of Chicken Hill in Pottstown, PA, in the 1930s. 

Humor and warmth bubble up on almost every page. The human heart prevails. I challenge the reader to finish the epilogue without shivers up their spine and tears in their eyes. 

Even in these dark times of racial injustice and misunderstanding, McBride shows how… show more.

By chance, I was watching Walter Isaacson’s interview with James McBride on Amanpour’s television show. I didn’t know McBride’s work. I liked the fact that he didn’t answer in a rehearsed way to Isaacson’s questions. The novel looked offbeat. I was also interested because the novel was set in the twenties and thirties, and I am writing a novel set in the thirties.

I loved this novel because of the relationships and friendships between idiosyncratic characters: Orthodox Jews who stay rooted in an African-American neighborhood when everyone else has vamoosed.

The uncovering of a skeleton in the seventies in Chicken… show more.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store has vigorous and distinctive prose and a big cast of vividly realized characters set in the Black and immigrant (mostly Jewish) section of a Pennsylvania industrial town in the 1920s and 1930s. The novel begins with the modern-day discovery of a body.

How the corpse got there and who he was in life, however, is a mere detail in the lively pagent provided by hardscrabble Chicken Hill and particularly its grocery store, a community lifeline in hard times, thanks to its good-natured proprietors Chona and Moshe Ludlow.

In a time of open racial discrimination,… show more.

This is a delightfully engaging novel in itself, but especially wonderful (and unique in my reading experience) is how it offers full-on immersion into two otherwise distinct cultures: Black Americans and first-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, unfolding during the 1930s.

Astonishingly, author McBride is equally at home in both, fluent in language, nuance, and history, deeply sensitive to the plights and struggles of each, and terrifically sympathetic to both while reflecting a heart-warming connection that unites the two “worlds.” The book includes a stunning surprise ending that ties up the whole adventure into a satisfying package.