The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

A Fiction review by Michael Greenstein

Black-Jewish saxophonist James McBride alternates between jazz and klezmer in his latest novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. Set mainly in Pottstown, Pennsylvania during the 1930s, the novel covers considerable ground in portraying two distinct yet overlapping communities. Musical notes appear near the very beginning as Moshe Ludlow, husband of protagonist Chona, cleans his All-American Dance Hall and Theater after a concert by Chick Webb: “Webb and his roaring twelve-piece band was the greatest musical event Moshe had ever witnessed in his life, except for the weekend he managed to lure Mickey Katz, the brilliant yet temperamental Yiddish genius of klezmer music.” Twelve is the most significant number in this novel since a chapter concerning Moshe’s dreams is devoted to it: on the one hand, it may represent the twelve tribes of Israel; on the other hand, it relates to McBride’s twelve-tone jazz composition and improvisation across his sprawling Pennsylvania panorama. His magic realism carries the reader from local grocery store on Chicken Hill to a broader American story between heaven and earth. Chick Webb, Chicken Hill, duck boy, and significant eggs come home to roost in the intrigues, intricacies, and percussive web of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. 

McBride’s musical mystery begins with a well that also has a way of moving from the local to the universal. The old well contains a skeleton and a mezuzah, which are ultimately washed away by Hurricane Agnes, so all evidence disappears into the Manawatawny Creek. “And from there, every single bit of that who-shot-John nonsense got throwed into the Schuylkill, and from there, it flowed into the Chesapeake Bay down in Maryland, and from there, out to the Atlantic.” McBride’s style radiates from the regional in his flowing prose, and also in his repetition of archetypal wells from the Bible and medieval mythologies of poisoning wells. In an exchange between Chona and Moshe its double meaning is conveyed, as he emphatically tells her, “We are doing well!” to which she responds: “Don’t you see the well they draw from?” McBride draws from multiple wells as he examines the state of well-being in his two symbiotic communities. 

The old well also belongs to “old” tropes in this historical novel that contrasts old and new worlds. The narrative begins with “There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue.” Moshe tells himself “This is old thinking in a new time,” after his belief in sorcery and satire of the town’s Presbyterian history – the Colonial Dames of America, the Pennsylvanian Potting Club, the Nineteen Mountain People Whose Fourteenth Cousin Arrived on the Mayflower. That history is opposed to Jewish emigration from Europe and the Middle Passage of enslaved African Americans who eventually moved from the American South to the North. “Moshe watched in puzzlement as these Americans danced with clumsy satisfaction at the moans and groans of these boneless, noise-producing junk mongers, their boring humpty-dumpty sounds landing on the dance floor with all the power of empty peanut shells tossed in the air.” This send-up of the empowered crowd contrasts with jazz and klezmer music, as well as the impassioned dancing of Malachi, the last Jew on Chicken Hill. 

The novel’s sentences sing and dance, as they borrow terminology from the two ethnic communities – fusgeyer, chevry, and jook. Fusgeyer, literally a foot goer, is a designation for the wandering Jew, with particular reference to impoverished Romanian Jews who couldn’t afford any means of transportation one hundred years ago. But the fusgeyer underscores an even more important theme in the novel – the crippled nature of a number of central characters.

Moshe is a fusgeyer married to Chona who is crippled from polio so that she wears “a boot with a sole four inches thick.” Her four-inch sole contrasts with her “spiritual soul” that inhabits “the sole Jewish grocery in Chicken Hill.” McBride plays with language as he would the scales of music. Watching Chona churn butter, Moshe thinks of the story of his biblical namesake Moses and the burning coals, the resulting speech impediment yet another defect in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. “Cripples, Moshe thought, have brought me fortune: Moses, Chona, and Chick.” Fleeing pogroms, the foreign fusgeyer makes it in America, alongside an array of disabled dancers, musicians, and politicians. 

Chona is not the only limping character, for her antagonist Doc Roberts also limps, most notably during marches of the Ku Klux Klan. Hence the need for the corrective “Skrup Shoe,” custom-made shoes expertly crafted by the Skrupskilis family. The novel is dedicated to “tikkun olam” – repairing the world. These shoemakers and handymen repair the world on one level, while Chona engages in charitable acts of tikkun throughout her years in the grocery store where she acts compassionately toward all the Negroes who gather there: “she saw it as a place where every act of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul.” Between heaven and earth, soul and sole, McBride rhapsodizes and eulogizes his divine comedy of Pottstown’s purgatory. 

Two other characters have significant impediments. As a result of a domestic explosion young Dodo loses his hearing, and Chona adopts him. When Doc Roberts molests her, Dodo comes to her rescue, but the deaf child is sent to an institution where he in turn is abused by another villain – Son of Man. On Ward C-1 at Pennhurst State Hospital for the Insane and Feeble-Minded, Dodo’s roommate Monkey Pants is also physically impaired. “He lay on his side in a ball, his neck and shoulder hunched, curled in an odd tangle of twisted hands and feet, one leg impossibly reaching toward his face – the ankle nearly at his chin – the other leg lost in a cacophony of twisted arms, elbows, knees, and fingers, with one hand thrust out of the twisted cacophony of limbs.” Like a mangled saxophone, this description captures the American gothic, grotesque, and twisted cacophony within the novel’s broader polyphonic prose. What is actually twisted in Pennhurst is the perverted state of mind of Son of Man, the pedophile on the ward. 

Monkey Pants’ cacophonous limbs manage to communicate with Dodo in a kind of Morse Code (Anna Morse runs a funeral home in a nearby town) where fingers capture letters of the alphabet. Monkey Pants spells out “Son of Man” as a warning to Dodo. When Miggy, the fortune teller, warns Son of Man to stay away from these boys, she tells his future; for he tells her that he will jam a knife down her throat, which is precisely the way he dies when Nate Love (Dodo’s uncle) plunges a kitchen knife into his heart. Even as the touching dialogue between Dodo and Monkey Pants partakes of tikkun olam, so the stabbing of Son of Man by Nate Love is a further act of repair and purging of the past. Nate’s background is highly significant in understanding his crime. Originally from the Low Country of South Carolina to the promised land of Pennsylvania, “Nate was the last Love on Hemlock Row who had come north to live among the Lowgods, who somehow forgot him and plunged him into a childhood of begging and stealing.” And that plunge leads immediately to the plunge of the knife, just as the cathartic retribution has been prepared for by his wife Addie, “who dipped her hand into the pool of injury …. She cleansed him.” Nate is the last Love; Malachi the last Jew.

Migration from Low Country to Lowgod constitutes a version of the fusgeyer in an impoverished trek across America. The overlapping experiences of McBride’s two groups are further emphasized by Moshe’s surname Ludlow, as the novel traces various journeys from lower status to heavenly heights, with tikkun at every turn. If the opening hurricane erases history and landscape, purging all evidence, then the closing paragraphs offer catharsis through Dodo’s future as Nate Love II. He remembers Chona’s magic marbles and Monkey Pants “who thrust his finger out and held it in the dark like a beacon.” The Statue of Liberty shines in the touch of a black finger to a white one -- the sounds of jazz and Mosaic stutter. 

Dodo dies on June 22, 1972, “the same day Hurricane Agnes wiped much of Pottstown off the face of the earth and a day after an old Jew named Malachi the Magician vanished.” A frenetic fusgeyer, Malachi frames the narrative and adds to its magic realism. The skeleton at the bottom of the well is Doc Roberts, mistakenly beaten by brass knuckles ordered by gangster Nig Rosen and delivered by Henry Lit – another overdetermined name in a novel where names enter the parade and polyphony. Thus, Italian Big Soap is also responsible for cleansing catharsis when he connects the water supply to the synagogue. And Paper does the laundry to clean Pottstown, while she spreads the local news in her oral role. “Paper was a banging drum” with her gospel song in the “land of supposed good, clean freedom” where the reality is the “filth of factories.” Miggy is a cleaner at Pennhurst, Dirt is a minor character, and all contribute to the final redemption. 

In addition to Doc Roberts’ skeleton, the well also contains a mezuzah that had belonged to Chona. When the investigating police ask Malachi what the piece of jewelry is, he tells them that it’s a mezuzah. The cops tell him that it matches the one on the door, whereupon Malachi replies that “Jewish life is portable” – part of fusgeyer philosophy. The Hebrew inscription on the back of the mezuzah says, “Home of the Greatest Dancer in the World.” Mythical Malachi, the dancing angel between heaven and earth, participates in the novel’s cathartic choreography. “Old Mr. Malachi got off clean …. The last of the Jews around here. That fella was a wizard …. He could dance, too …. That man was magic.” His wizardry aligns with Chick Webb’s drumming and Katz’s clarinet in a whirlwind of composition and improvisation: “under the spell of Katz’s gorgeous musical wizardry, Moshe watched in wonder as the man danced like a demon all night …. The Hasid was a wonder of twisted elbows.” Malachi’s twisted elbows contrast with Monkey Pants’ deformation, his wonderment with the wandering Jew, and his dexterity with crippled characters in the All-American Dance Hall. Out of place, he is all over the place – a ubiquitous angel dancing through the Diaspora, uniting Black and Jewish communities. 

In the Ahavat Achim (brotherly love) Synagogue a men’s group, the “chevry,” meets to discuss business. Chevry derives from the Hebrew for friend but also means binding or composition, for McBride’s composition is interconnected with his sense of community. The dynamic between binding and fleeing plays out between chevry and fusgeyer. This act of communal binding from Jewish chevry to Negro family constitutes the tikkun of the novel. Fatty’s black jook joint carries Chick Webb’s wizardry to Mickey Katz’s. The two communities come together when Chona dies at the end of the middle section of the novel as McBride’s saxophone wails: “the group tramped forward, a ragtag assortment of travellers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travellers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high.” High and low, narrow and wide, they “moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them – Isaac, Nate, and the rest – into a future of American nothing.” This nostalgic longing further binds chevry, jook, fusgeyer, and the crippled, against a hurricane that also empties into the Atlantic. 

If chevry is one source of communal binding, so too is the machzor, the Hebrew prayer book for the high holy days, that Malachi carries with him. Literally it derives from the root of return or repeat, central to Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and other festivals. One typo reverses the word to “mazchor,” which relates to memory. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is both reminder and repeater of the past as it moves toward a future of tikkun. A McBridean sentence percusses across the landscape: “They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted.” The wistful wizardry of his prose aligns him with Charles Dickens – their suspenseful, melodramatic plots and crowds of characters including heroes and villains. Chona’s churning of butter contrasts with the churning of American industry and McBride’s progressive prose. 

A jook chevry may be found next door to Chona’s grocery store where Bernice Davis, sister of Fatty Davis, lives. They are related to almost every black person on the Hill: “She was second cousin to Earl ‘Shug’ Davis, driver for the vice president of Pottstown Bank; second cousin to Bobby Davis, who once worked as an all-around handyman for Buck Weaver, the great Pottstown baseball player who played for the Chicago White Sox; and also, by dint of twisted, convoluted intermarriage between her grandfather and his son’s stepdaughter, was great-aunt to Mrs. Traffina Davis, the wife of Reverend Sturgess, meaning Bernice was actually twelve years younger than her great-niece.” This convoluted family and sentence belong within the larger structural and thematic framing that governs the novel. Family branches reflect the convoluted plot and interconnected jook chevry. Like a ripple in a well or a musical note that reverberates from player to player, McBride’s phrases accumulate and modulate throughout Chicken Hill. 

This ripple effect occurs when Moshe tries to remember Malachi from his first appearance twelve years earlier. The long sentence is preceded by a simile – “his memory fluttered back like pages in a book.” Just as the laundress Paper reminds us of the reading process, so these pages encourage the reader to follow the physicality of the text through the medium of an elongated fusgeyer-chevry-jook sentence: “In the dawn’s early light, as the sun glimmered its first peek over the eastern slopes and shone down on the shacks and shanties of Chicken Hill, inside the very building where, in the warm basement twelve years before, love flew into his heart with the grace of a butterfly, and a beautiful young girl, now his wife, churned yellow into butter, pointing out the magic words of the Torah to him, a book she was forbidden to touch, her hand running across the page, revealing the promise held by words of sanctity, love, and history – the shutter of memory flickered again and he saw amid the crowd outside his theater the impish face, the hat, the tallit, the dimples of a young man standing among Jews of all types; then, as if a distant bell were ringing, like a train whistle in the distance, he heard, in distant memory, the wonderful wailing clarinet of Mickey Katz.” The sentence stretches from the American anthem in the dawn’s early light to Mickey Katz’s clarinet, with similes embracing bells, trains, and memories from a distance. From magic realism to the magic words of the Torah, from Chona’s running hand to her limping gait, and from the basement to heaven, McBride packs his sentences. Personal memories become collective within a Mosaic tradition, the jazz of history pulsed through clauses and similes that invoke the great temples of Egypt “like the times of old.” Just as Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead revisits David Copperfield, so McBride Americanizes The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, and Bleak House in TheHeaven & Earth Grocery Store.

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About the Author:

James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

About the Reviewer:

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (Sept. 12 2023)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593743776

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593743775