James McBride’s lat­est nov­el takes place on Chick­en Hill, the low-income sec­tion of Pottstown, PA. In the 1910s, its inhab­i­tants are pri­mar­i­ly Jews and African Amer­i­cans. But by the 1930s, almost all res­i­dents are African Amer­i­can — except for Moshe and Chona, a white Jew­ish cou­ple who own and oper­ate The Heav­en & Earth Gro­cery Store. Chona was raised in this store and has decid­ed to keep it rather than leave, as the rest of the Jews have; and, as a result, she’s built lov­ing rela­tion­ships with the Black folk in town. When they call on her to hide a young dis­abled boy from author­i­ties who want to put him in a men­tal insti­tu­tion, she quick­ly takes up the cause.

There are a num­ber of nov­els that exam­ine the rela­tion­ships between Jews and African Amer­i­cans, but few do so as expert­ly and ele­gant­ly as McBride’s. 

The Heav­en & Earth Gro­cery Store is an excel­lent read for those inter­est­ed in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, and it is anoth­er exam­ple of James McBride’s tal­ent as a novelist. — Ben­jamin Selesnick, Jewish Book Council