The great American mixing bowl
The mystery of a skeleton in a well builds into a richly drawn portrait of a Black and immigrant community in the Depression era
Truth, the saying goes, lies at the bottom of a well. But in the opening of James McBride’s enchanting new novel, it is a skeleton that police discover deep down inside an old water source in Pottstown, Pa. The mystery surrounding these remains drives the plot of “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.” Fortunately, the novel has a lot more to offer than all of that “who-shot-John nonsense” — which is a good enough premise for luring the reader into McBride’s rich, carefully drawn portrait of a Depression-era community of African Americans and Jewish immigrants as they live, love, fight, and, of course, work, in a small Midwestern town.
The ensemble cast mostly resides in a subsection of Pottstown called Chicken Hill, “a tiny area of ramshackle houses and dirt roads where the town’s blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn’t afford any better lived.” Chicken Hill is not a melting pot, but a mixing bowl — where “everyone knew the Romanians were crazy” or that Bulgarians “can’t pour a glass of water without making a party of it.” The novel is set in the mid-1930s, in a time before whiteness became the monochrome commodity that it is today. To be “white,” back then, reflected a far more complicated, and contested, spectrum — one which did not encompass Jewish immigrants, many of whom in the novel are still “fresh” from Eastern Europe and cannot speak English.
This is a group of relative newcomers that Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian Jew and one of the main protagonists, is eager to assimilate away from. Moshe hates Yiddish, and challah, preferring ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread, “which were like everything in America — neat and quick […].” Aside from the dread that stirs whenever Moshe hears words like “government” or “law,” he cherishes his new American life.
Moshe’s Hasidic friend Malachi, however, does not share his enthusiasm. Instead, Malachi, loyal to the ways of the Old World, keeps a prayer book in his pocket and wears a tallit un
THE HEAVEN AND EARTH GROCERY STORE: A Novel
By James McBride Riverhead, 400 pages, $28