The setting is Chicken Hill, a neighborhood in Pottstown, PA that is populated by Negros, Jews, and European immigrants. Set during the mid-twentieth century the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is run by Chona, a good hearted soul who allows credit, forgives debt, and makes no earnings for the grocery store. Her husband, Moshe, runs a dance hall that is integrated and brings in dance bands which are touring the country. Nate is Moshe's right hand man and his wife Addie helps with the grocery store and helps Chona who is disabled from childhood polio.

Nate and Addie assume responsibility for nephew, Dodo, who is deaf from the explosion of a stove, when his mother dies. Dodo comes to the attention of state authorities who want to put him in a residential home. The rest of the book revolves around the characters (many of them with more than one name) of Chicken Hill trying to conceal Dodo from the authorities, then working to free him from the residential school once he is captured.

It took me about half way through the book to get engaged with the story because there were so many characters and so many back stories. The story is populated with people who are marginalized by society in general and who ban together to work for the greater good of one another, though they sometimes have their own sense of justice. ( )

In the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, PA, Jews and Blacks live in relative peace and harmony, above the largely white town below. Conflict comes when Nate and Addie ask Chona and Moshe to help them hide their nephew, Dodo, who is an orphan and mostly deaf after an accident with an exploding stove. The state wants to put him in Pennhurst, a "special school" or hell on earth, depending who's talking. Moshe and Chona do help - as does their neighbor Bernice, who slips Dodo in with her own kids when the state agent comes - but when white supremacist Doc Roberts assaults Chona, Dodo leaps at him, leading to his capture and institutionalization. Then, many in town work together to break him free - a complicated venture using bits of knowledge from different people woven together into a web, each with different debts and loyalties.

Inspired by Sy Friend and Bob Arch, and the Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children in Worcester, PA.

Quotes

"Our ways give comfort rather than cause sorrow." (Malachi to Moshe, 64)

"We are integrating into a burning house." (Malachi to Moshe, 71)

He'd come as a matter of conscience but now was a matter of love. (107)

Isn't that what Judaism should do, bring light and reflection between cultures? (107)

"You can't right every wrong in the world." (Nate to Addie, 199)

"You can forever remember the wrongs done to you as long as you live....But if you forget 'em and go on living, it's almost as good as forgiving." (Addie to Nate, 201)

She felt the prayer more than heard it; it started from somewhere deep down and fluttered toward her head like tiny flecks of light, tiny beacons moving like a school of fish, continually swimming away from a darkness that threatened to swallow them. (Chona, 218)

There was nothing to do but talk, which at times like these is all that's left. (223)

"The law in this land is what the white man says it is, mister." (Nate to Isaac, 281)

"What do we owe each other on this Hill, Bernice?" (Fatty, 290) ( )

Once again I was disappointed in another much-hyped book.

This novel tells the story of Black and Jewish residents of the Chicken Hill neighbourhood of Pottstown in eastern Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 30s. At the centre of the story are Moshe Ludlow and his wife Chona. Moshe is a theatre owner while Chona runs the grocery store, a gathering place for Blacks and immigrant Jews. The theatre is successful, but the store never makes a profit because Chona allows people to buy so much on credit. When the state institutionalizes a 12-year-old deaf Black boy named Dodo, the community members join forces to try and save him from Pennhurst, the notoriously abusive mental institution.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store serves as a motif for the theme of building community across cultures. 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,” is not without its tensions; even the Jewish families do not get along: “The Germans and Poles despised one another, and all feared the head of the sole Lithuanian family.” Nonetheless the divisions among the various groups do not prevent them from working together. In fact, there is an interdependence among community members. Moshe, the Jewish theatre owner, has a black man, Nate Timblin, as his assistant. Both Jewish klezmer musicians and black jazz musicians are featured. Chona’s best friend is Addie, Nate’s wife. When Nate’s nephew is threatened, both blacks and Jews work together to rescue him, and the groups also band together to get clean water to the community. Chona summarizes the message that “one’s tribe cannot be better than another tribe because they were all one tribe.”

The novel portrays the harsh truths about America’s treatment of Black and Jewish citizens. Though the white man in the American south “spoke his hatred in clear, clean, concise terms” there is also hatred in Pennsylvania where the white man “hid his hatred behind stores of wisdom and bravado, with the false smiles of sincerity and stories of Jesus Christ and other nonsense that he tossed about like confetti in the Pottstown parade.” Jews are also second-class citizens: “the rules of life were laid carefully . . . by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ. . . . Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of these things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked – or worse.” Of course, there is no acknowledgment that those who rule the country “[live] on stolen land.”

The style of the novel will not appeal to everyone. The author excels at very lengthy sentences. For instance, “Now, with their beloved shul a pile of rubble – some of which was marble, having come from a stone quarry in Carrara, Italy, and bought at a ridiculous price by Norman Skrupskelis, since it was to be used for the woman’s mikvah to be named in honor of his late mother, Yvette Hurlbutt Nezefky Skrupskelis, whom no one had ever seen since she died in Europe in a town whose name was so complex that the Germans called it Thumb-in-Your-Nose – the congregation faced its first real crisis.”

Then there are so many characters, almost like in a Dickens novel, and each, even the minor ones, is given a detailed backstory. This lack of focus sometimes makes it difficult to know who will be play an important role. The point of view skips from character to character, though always in the third person. There are several plots, though they do overlap. Unfortunately, this means that repetitions do occur. Digressions are common; for instance, the ancestry of the town’s doctor is traced back to “a manservant for Chinese emperor Chaing Kai Wu in Monashu Province in 1774.” Some of these tangents seem overly long and purposeless and they affect the pacing.

In fact, I found pacing a problem. The novel begins slowly and with its digressions feels disconnected and meandering. Only after the introduction of Dodo is there some feeling of cohesion. Some characters’ backstories are very detailed, yet Nate’s past is described belatedly and rather vaguely when more information, given Nate’s significance throughout, would be appropriate.

Then there are the intrusions of a lecturing 21st-century voice which speaks of the people of Chicken Hill moving “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.” This voice continues to describe “an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices . . . that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch . . . a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.” This heavy-handed speechifying is unnecessary.

This is not a bad book; I just didn’t find it as entertaining and outstanding as many other readers. I appreciate the author’s writing skill and liked his celebration of cross-cultural solidarity, but I wasn’t left in awe. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit it, but I find that a lot of American literature is over-hyped so that I inevitably end up disappointed.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com) and follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DCYakabuski). ( )

Addressing the melting pot of cultures in the northeast in the 1930s, this is a rich and colorful tale of people of different races, religions and cultures who have hurt and helped each other. I thought it could have been shorter. ( )

A splendid tale with a collection of memorable characters and a captivating plot. ( )