The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store summary

This story begins with a gruesome discovery on Chicken Hill, Pottstown, Pennsylvania. A skeleton, at the bottom of an old well. Also: a belt buckle, the tattered remains of a costume, and a woven pendant, later identified as a mezuzah, a sacred Jewish object usually placed at a home’s threshold. The police suspect that an old Jew named Malachi, the last remaining Jew on Chicken Hill, knows something about the murder. But before they can close in on him, a huge storm, Hurricane Agnes, blows through Pottstown, flattening most of it. The skeleton washes away. Malachi disappears and is never seen again.

Rewind 47 years, to 1925. Moshe Ludlow, a Jewish theater owner, walks dejectedly into the Heaven and Earth Grocery store on Chicken Hill. The theater he owns isn’t doing well, but the sight of Chona, the shopowner’s beautiful daughter, cheers him. Later that week, at a Klezmer concert in his theater, Moshe is entranced at the sight of a hasidic Jew, clearly newly arrived from the old country, who dances like a whirlwind. He will say nothing more about where he is from or what he is doing here. “Wherever you’re from,” Moshe tells him, “must be the home of the world’s greatest dancer.”

Moshe keeps coming back to the Heaven and Earth grocery store, where Chona counsels him through his business troubles, referring back to stories from the Torah. After three weeks of these visits, Moshe proposes marriage. Chona accepts.

Nate, Moshe’s Black employee, remarks that it’s a long time since any of Chicken Hill’s Black residents enjoyed a concert – the last theater catering to them has closed. Moshe thinks: What if he opened his theater to Black audiences, too? He is nervous at the prospect, but fair-minded Chona urges him on. He books the Black entertainer Chick Webb, and the concert is a sellout. Soon Moshe’s success rivals that of larger theater-owners. It also brings out racist and antisemitic complaints from Pottstown’s white residents – there are Blacks all over town, now, they gripe, and a money-grabbing Jew behind it all! 

Moshe doesn’t mind. He’s now so successful that he tells Chona they can close the grocery store and move off Chicken Hill to one of the city’s tonier suburbs. Chona refuses. She likes working at the store, and she likes Chicken Hill. Despite their new wealth, they stay there. But ever since a childhood bout of polio left her crippled, Chona’s health has been frail. In 1936, she grows sick and seems certain to die. In what appear to be her final days, a steady stream of mostly Black customers come to pay their respects. They haven’t forgotten how Chona served them. One guest is especially insistent – Moshe wakes to them banging on the shop door at dawn. It is the Hasid. He introduces himself as Malachi and says he wants to buy flour to make Challah.

Chona’s fever breaks. Malachi visits with the Challah and says that the bread will be part of Chona’s healing. He says he is thinking of opening a bakery on Chicken Hill. Moshe gifts him with a Mezuzah that can be worn around the neck – it says “Home of the World’s Greatest Dancer” and Moshe explains that wherever Malachi wears his Mezuzah, he will be home. Malachi later gives the mezuzah to Chona.

Shortly after that, Malachi disappears again.

ANALYSIS

While The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store features a dizzying array of characters, from pivotal players like Moshe and Chona to the rotating cast of union men, neighborhood children, gangsters, city officials, and swing musicians, its setting is tightly confined to the small city of Pottstown Pennsylvania, and more specifically, the neighborhood of Chicken Hill. By focusing on this small yet remarkably diverse neighborhood, McBride is able to explore the tensions between all Pottstown’s different groups: Black, white, Jewish, established, immigrant. Even within these groups, there are faultlines. The Blacks that live on Hemlock Row, above Chicken Hill, sneer at how the Chicken Hill Blacks strive to make themselves respectable in the eyes of their white employers; German-speaking Jews regard Yiddish-speaking Jews as provincial; Italian women from different regions squabble about the best way to prepare traditional recipes. And yet, the novel shines a light on the ways certain characters – like Chona and Nate – work to create connections across this minefield of oppression, tension, and difference. Ultimately, Chicken Hill, with its patchwork of races and religions, is portrayed as a close knit community and refuge.