North

 North

By Brad Kessler

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

 The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

By James McBride

At this point, I think I might have read as many McBride books as Murakami stories. He's an author who's work I know I will love, whatever the subject matter, and this was no different.

The book is set in 1930s Pottstown, PA, in the community of Chicken Hill. The area was first settled by Jewish immigrants, who in recent decades had been moving out as they tried to align their lives with the town's white residents and, in doing so, made room for increasing numbers of black people to move in. Moshe, a theater owner, and his wife Chona, though, are holdouts, largely because of the latter's insistence. Chona refuses to live her life by the "white" majority's rules, does not see moving closer to their environs as a step up -- and cannot understand Pottstown's division of people into classes and races. She grew up in Chicken Hill -- her father was its first rabbi -- and would stay there.

Part of the draw is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which, thanks to good business, Moshe is able to buy. The couple live above it, and it becomes something of the child that Chona herself cannot have. Monetarily, it is a losing proposition; but as a community center it is gold. It is not only a gathering place, but a social services network as well. And so, when a young Chicken Hill black boy, rendered deaf by a stove explosion that killed his mother, catches the attention of the state, who wants to put him in an institution where he will receive an "education", Chona and Moshe hide him. 

But then he is discovered. By Doc, an affable small-town doctor to local whites -- and a predator to the black and Jewish communities. When, in the middle of a seizure, to which Chona is prone, Doc begins to assault Chona, Dodo, the hidden boy, reveals himself and defends his adopted mother, an act that seals his fate to the institution. The community then must work together to get him back.

This, of course, is just one plot thread in the book. As a colleague remarked, McBride is a master of building these apparently different lines for hundreds of pages, and then bringing them all together at the end. Plot aside, though, this is a meditation on white power and privilege and the sickness it creates. It was a wonderful read. McBride's dialogue was particularly spot on and helped bring life and laughter to the characters.