If chicken soup is balm for the soul, then James McBride’s eighth book, set in 1930s Chicken Hill, a neighbourhood in a small town in Pennsylvania that is home to Jewish, black and other immigrant people, is its literary equivalent. There is something nourishing about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a warm story about the power of community in the face of prejudice that both salutes the American dream while exposing it as a sham.
Like much of McBride’s previous work, which includes four other novels, a biography of James Brown and his 1996 memoir, A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, about his Jewish mother, Ruth, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store tackles race and religion via the prism of McBride’s own family’s history. His Jewish grandmother, whom he never met, provides the inspiration for Chona, an American-born Jew who runs the eponymous store. ‘The Negroes of Chicken Hill loved Chona. They saw her not as a neighbour but an artery to freedom,’ McBride writes, describing how Chona views the black residents ‘not as Negroes but as neighbours with infinitely interesting lives’.
We meet her through the eyes of the man she will marry: Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian Jew who owns the local theatre and dance hall. Moshe is making a hash of organising a concert starring Mickey Katz, a klezmer musician who is one of a number of real- life legends who anchor McBride’s fiction in reality. Moshe takes Hebrew lessons from Chona’s father, a rabbi: falling for Chona is an unexpected bonus to his rush of religious fervour.
Although the story is set in the 1930s, we start it in June 1972, when construction workers find a skeleton at the bottom of an old well.
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