McBride, James. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Riverhead Penguin New York, 2023.F; 9/23.

This is the second novel I’ve read by this author and it’s even better than Deacon King Kong, the first one. Mr. McBride has a Jewish and a black parent and the volatile mix of those two deeply rich oppressed histories ignites in the gentle combustion chamber of his imagination. There are a lot of characters and subplots both here and in the first book, reminding me of Jennifer Egan. I even went back and started to read this one again to straighten things out but decided I had the traffic control picture after a few dozen reread pages.

Moshe is a hard-working diffident resident of the Chicken Hill slum in 1930s fictional Pottsburg. He falls in love with and marries gorgeous mildly mobility-impaired Chona, who starts and maintains the titular grocery store. The community consists of Central European Jews, blacks, and traditional American whites who of course look down on everyone else. Moshe employs Nate, a psychologically powerful black man with a dark past, in his theatre which crosses racial boundaries profitably attracting Jews and blacks to hear famous jazz greats and klezmer bands. The community is described with hilarious self-deprecating racial realism.

Nate took a chaw out of the bread … and tossed the whole mess to a brown spotted mutt who emerged from one of the claptrap houses that lined the roads up onto the Hill.

… Jews from Eastern Europe were impatient and hard to control. The Hungarians were prone to panic, the Poles grew sullen, the Lithuanians were furious and unpredictable, and the Romanians, well, that would be Moshe—the sole Romanian— … did whatever his wife told him to do…

Nate and his wife Addie care for 12-year-old adopted Dodo who was temporarily blinded and is permanently deaf after a stove explosion. The boy is sought by government agents who want to put him in a dreadful local institution for the mentally retarded, but Chona and her neighbour protect him after Moshe tries to hide him in the basement of the theatre.

“You think because a child can’t hear he’s not cold at night? You think he’s not afraid of the dark? You think he’s happy to sleep in a cold theater? You think because his ears don’t work he doesn’t feel cold? Or lonely? Or that his heart doesn’t break for his mother? You think that?” “I run a theater,” Moshe said. “What do I know about children?” Chona tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot, placed it on the stove, and spoke over her shoulder. “Go put that fire out and bring him home.”

Subplots swirl around these and a dozen or so others making Chicken Hill and the town nearby semi-ironically mythical. Second-order characters include a tough wealthy cousin of Moshe, schemers and fighters, and smart sexy women:

Mild-mannered deacons who … (toiled) all day as smiling waiters at the Pottstown Social Club … watched Paper’s proud breasts swing freely beneath her dress as she floated past and suddenly heard the sound of a thousand drums pounding down the Amazon, accompanied by visions of drowning their bosses. Bricklayers paved her chimney just to watch her bend over the petunias in her gloriously full-flowered yard.

PLOT ALERT Dodo witnesses the local doctor trying to rape Chona and the boy is blamed, captured and dragged to the institution. There he connects with a severely physically disabled but bright and kind fellow inmate. There is an evil employee abusing patients. END PLOT ALERT.

Through all this and more McBride’s writing is alive with sympathy, moral insight, and ironic humour.

… moving toward a common destiny, all of them … into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.

(P)retending to know everything and acting like you’re better than you know you are puts a terrible strain on a body. It makes you a stumbling stone to your own justice.

There are bad people to help us frame contrast to the morally struggling characters on Chicken Hill. The white doctor is racist as well as sexually aggressive:

Those were wonderful days, Doc’s childhood, full of strong men whose handshake was their bond and women who knew how to cook and raise children. Nice, clean families. This was before the “new people”—the Jews, the Negroes, the Greeks, the Mennonites, the Russian Orthodox—arrived.

But much worse is the developmentally disabled institution staff member ironically referred to as the Son of Man. He’s black:

There was an evil to him when he touched me. It was strong in him, and it made me afraid. Weren’t no use complaining or telling the white folks. He got the run of things down there. The white bosses love him on account of his size and his tongue, for he is a smooth-talking devil. But when they ain’t looking, he runs them patients and the other attendants like a gang.

This complicated story is comedy, not tragedy. The ending segues into a salvation that McBride refers to as real in his own life. Terrible things happen during the gentle handling of flawed lovable characters, but it’s fundamentally lighthearted. There is something redemptive in this writer’s combination of Jews and blacks in 20^th-century America.

Well worth it. 9.1/9.1