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In 1972, workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton in an old well. No one from the outside knows who it is and what happened, and the longtime residents of the neighborhood have nothing to say. They’ve kept the secret for 35 years, after all.
In the 1930s, Moshe Ludlow arrives in the neighborhood, Chicken Hill, where Blacks and Jews live apart from the rest of Pottstown. When he meets Chona, the daughter of the owner of the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, he is smitten. They marry and he moves in to the apartment over the store. Moshe starts a music theater, where he brings in Yiddish musicians and then popular Black musicians. He doesn’t care about keeping the races separate; he cares about good music that will bring in people and their money.
So his theater is integrated, and so is the store. Chona runs the store more as a service to all those who need it in the neighborhood; she’s always in the red. But Moshe loves her, and she loves doing what she does, so he is OK with his theater subsidizing her work.
When a deaf boy, the nephew of Moshe’s Black janitor at the theater (a man he considers a friend), needs to be protected, Chona jumps at the opportunity to help. The state intends to take the boy and institutionalize him, but the community knows just how horrific the institution is. So Chona and Moshe hide him away and everyone does a little to keep him safe. But eventually, the white establishment will have its way, and people are going to be hurt.
This novel explores marginalized communities a century ago, contrasting the life of those on the outside with white Christians (men, almost exclusively). It also takes some time to contrast the lives of Blacks in the North with those in the South, since many in this community had fled parts of the South for the North. And it certainly wasn’t the dream of racial harmony some may have expected. It was interesting to see how some Blacks and Jews lived and worked together in this story, though whether those alliances could be termed truly friendship or something else depends on the character.
I enjoyed The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and the window on this time period and place, the racial concerns then, and the ways to compare with conditions today. It was impossible not to love Chona, with her generosity and big heart. And there were moments I got a kick out of, when characters were getting things done in their own way because the establishment wouldn’t do it for them (as it should have). I was entertained by the very last section as the mystery introduced at the beginning was explained through a whole series of almost funny hijinks. But that humor was tempered by what was happening at the same time to the boy the community was trying to take care of. I would say that it all came together, and I appreciated the book and the author’s writing, but there were too many spots that I had a hard time reading because of the content (it’s one plot line that I wish I had been warned about myself).
Rated: High. Profanity includes 2 uses of strong language, around 12 instances of moderate profanity, about 15 uses of mild language, and fewer than 10 instances of the name of Deity in vain. There are 20 uses of the n-word, and other derogatory racial terms. Sexual content includes references to sex and some crudeness. Violence includes references to murders, an accidental killing, some fights, and sexual violence. There is a scene where an unconscious woman is molested, and there are references to the attacker doing similar things to other women. The most disturbing, and most detailed, instance is of a pedophile raping a boy. Other scenes leading up to it show the intent of the man to do so, and there are references to the man and the scene afterward.
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