From a Google image Search – WHYY

I hesitate to write about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride because so many readers already have done so, but I do like to obsessively keep track of the books I read. Besides, there are things to say. I know, that’s what Julia Roberts said in Notting Hill. Now you all know that I have watched that movie too many times. 

McBride’s tale takes place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1936. The fact that his points, and there are points, intersect with where we are now in the twenty-first century is both surprising and rather shameful. James McBride is a musician and a writer of fiction, a rare crossover. He won a National Book Award in 2013 for his novel, The Good Lord Bird. 

We are not surprised that Jews and Black folks were American scapegoats in 1936. Hitler had just begun his awful politics in Europe and many Jewish people, perhaps already aware that they were about to be persecuted once again, left Europe to settle in America. Black folks have been persecuted continuously in America. As the tale begins some work on the Pottstown water system turns up a mezuzah and a human skeleton at the bottom of a hole where there is a connection to the local water reservoir. The rest of the story tells us how the mezuzah and the body got there.

Moshe had wandered down to Pottstown from New York City. He was a Jew who loved to party. He opened a theater, invited Klezmer musicians, and sold tickets to people to come in and dance. He became well-known to other agents who also booked musicians, and he had a brother, Isaac, who ran a very successful theater operation in Philadelphia. 

Moshe also owned the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. He married Chona, a beautiful woman who was not considered marriageable because she had a disability. Chona loved the other people who were their neighbors on Chicken Hill, even though they were black folks. They were her customers at the grocery store which she ran after her marriage to Moshe. Many of the Jews from Chicken Hill had moved to town, but Chona refused to leave Chicken Hill or to close the grocery story. She knew that human warmth and loyalty were worth more than social climbing. Her customers loved her and were protective of her.

In 1936 in America, people who were immigrants themselves from all over Europe looked down on Jews and considered Black folks a threat. These were the times when Germans chanted “Jews will not replace us.” We heard this refrain recently in America in Charlottesville when Trump was President #45. It was given a more general scope when some chanted “You will not replace us.” The only Americans indigenous to this continent are not European immigrants and yet the chant of “blood and soil” was also transplanted from Europe as if there are Americans who can authentically lay claim to being the “real” Americans (hint: they mean white Christian Americans).

If you read Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste, or Matthew Desmond’s books, Eviction, and Poverty by America, these authors speak of their belief that countries tend to need scapegoat groups, untouchables so to speak, for reasons such as holding onto power and hoarding money. Jewish and Black folks are our scapegoats in America, although not necessarily for the same reasons. They are easy to target because they stand out, one based on religion and the other based on skin color. These groups cannot easily hide or blend in with white or Christian Americans. Many of us are disgusted by this tendency, yet we see that these biases are kept alive by stereotypes, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. This prejudice ties those early Hitler years to present-day attitudes that persist in America. In contrast to the supportive relationship between Jewish and black people in McBride’s book, there are attempts made in this century to divide these two groups, to make Jews targets of hate and to turn black folks into people to be feared. 

Chona often needs to see a doctor because she has seizures. The only doctor in Pottstown is white and he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Everyone knows this because he also has a limp. Dr. Roberts went to school with Chona, and he has always desired her. In a key moment, Dr. Roberts sexually abuses Chona as she lies unconscious from a seizure in the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Dodo is the nickname of a child rendered deaf from a stove that blew up in his home before he became homeless. Chona and Moshe have taken Dodo in, and Dodo sees what Dr. Roberts does to Chona. Soon he finds himself committed to a local institution for homeless, deranged, and disabled people. Dodo is a black child. Nate, his wife Addy, and the entire black community of Chicken Hill are touched when Moshe and Chona take on this good child. 

Thus begins a chain of events that comes to a head on the day of the Memorial Day parade. Besides the plans for rescuing Dodo, another problem is addressed on this same day. It is related to the question, “Why is there a bullfrog in the mikvah?” The rescue of Dodo from the clutches of a monstrous man called Son of Man and the institution at Pennfield, and the explanation for how the mezuzah and a dead body got in the hole with the town’s water pipes depends on events that happen on this same chaotic Memorial Day occasion. It’s a great story that also highlights how little we have learned about our common situation as humans on this earth. Social commentary and social justice occur all in one fell swoop of the pen of James McBride. We should heed the lessons this tale teaches us with humor and also with its descriptions of shameful human behavior. You may end up saying along with Dodo, “Thank you, Monkey Pants.” I listened on Audible and since this book is full of dialects it was a pleasure.