The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store book review: Communities come together in Pennsylvania

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is imbued with the sort of fairy tale magical realism that would normally be enough to put me off. Yet this quirky, deceptively light novel about Jews and Black people coexisting in a hardscrabble Pennsylvania neighbourhood in the 1930s is an utter delight. And in a gloomy period for global Jewry, it’s a panacea to read of different communities coming together to defeat prejudice.

It begins with the discovery of a skeleton in 1972 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. But before long, it zips back in time to a Jewish couple in the 1930s living in an undesirable scrap of land known as Chicken Hill. Moshe is a theatre impresario who is trying to organise a night of Yiddish entertainment. A typo means he inadvertently invites the audience to “watch the Jews burn”, a minor hiccup from which he soon recovers. Meanwhile his passionate, altruistic balabusta wife Chona runs the eponymous grocery store, albeit not particularly efficiently since she keeps extending credit to the neighbourhood’s multi ethnic immigrants.

Chona is the heart and soul of this book. Fiery, unafraid to tackle bigotry head on, her gift, McBride writes, is that she had “not an ounce of bitterness or shred of shame. Unlike Moshe, Chona was an American”. Her can-do attitude eventually drives Moshe, his black janitor Nate and other characters to divest themselves of their fears and become people of action.