James McBride (2023) The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was Barrack Obama’s Pick for Book of the Year. You’d expect that. Much of the book is set in the years of the Great Depression, 1936. At the very bottom of the heap were the black man and woman. Standing beside them, but slightly above them were the immigrant whites, the Jews, whom the world could burn for all they cared. Top of the heap of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania those with some education like Doc Roberts, the community’s only physician and a great believer in eugenics and sheet-wearing member of the KKK. Of course, tales of attempted rape, molestation and stuff that is kept out of the papers from the sons of the revolution could never happen today.

Whose story is it?   

Well, of course, the American Indian had no claims on the land they’d lived on for millennia. No legal documents. Doc Roberts felt tricked by industrialists that had promised on a handshake not to pollute the water his family needed for their farm. His family had come over with the Mayflower, it was their land. And it had been overrun with the wrong kind of people. Black people and Jews, even Italians that could not speak the native tongue

‘Forty-seven years before construction workers discovered the skeleton in the old farmer’s well on Chicken Hill, a Jewish theatre in Portsdown, Pennsylvania named Moshe Ludlow had a vision about Moses.’

James McBride begins with questions—a murder mystery? Who does the skeleton belong to?  What happened to him? Did he deserve to die? Why wasn’t the body found?

At the epicentre of those questions are Moshe Ludlow who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, who did something magnificent but at the same time stupid. At the height of the Great Depression, he opened an All-American Dance Hall and Theatre on Main Street. All America was on Chicken Hill, which was hardly All American. It was mainly impoverished Jews and stony-broke blacks.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was an equally bad risk. It was no risk at all. Because it never made any money. But it was home to Moshe and his wife, the daughter of Rabbi Feldman. She had socialist leanings. She didn’t believe in children starving, even if they were black children. Chona was the beating heart of their community. A resident saint.

Dodo. Well, Chon and Moshe adopted Dodo. Not formally, he was a black kid. Nate Timberlin and his wife Addie had taken him on, but Dodo was on the run. His mum had died a horrible death and he’d been left blinded and deaf. He’d regained his sight. But the county, the white men in the county wanted to lock him away in one of those places where no one ever emerges whole.  

Jewish immigrant and black versus prejudice and white (hmmm what does that remind you of? Does it make you wonder why Obama picked this book?) A whole moral universe in these pages.  Read on.