Over the past two days, I have read James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Highly recommended.

McBride is the son of a Christian African American father, and a White Jewish mother. He himself was brought up Christian (his mother may have converted, I am not sure), but he absorbed a lot of Jewish practice and culture, and these play a large role in his writings.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store takes place largely in the 1920s and 1930s in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. I have never been in Pottstown, a real place, but I have been in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, another real place.

I mention this because when I wrote about our July trip to Maine on this blog, I mentioned our stop in Pottsville, the home of the Yuengling Brewery, the oldest existing brewery in the country, and the boyhood home of John O’Hara, author of Ten North Frederick, among other books. (I also mentioned the coffee shop/book store where the books are shelved by color.)

Someone commented on my blog post that it was also the site of the plots of some of James McBride’s books, which I found interesting. But – I learned this weekend – that Pottsville is not the the location that McBride used to set his stories, but that he instead opted for Pottstown, another real place. Pottstown and Pottsville are about 50 miles apart. If you start in Pottsville, and drive southwest towards Philadelphia, Pottstown would pretty much be your halfway point.

Now, how close McBride’s Pottstown is to the real Pottstown, I have no idea. Today, Pottstown has about 23,000 residents, according to Wikipedia. It is approximately 72% White, and 20% Black. In 1930, it had about 19,000 residents, but I don’t know the racial makeup. It does have one Jewish congregation, a Conservative congregation with a Reconstructionist trained rabbi, Chesed Shel Emeth. The congregation apparently shares its site with a Black church, Bethel Community Church. In fact, due to declining membership, the synagogue, which used to own the building, sold the it to the church about 8 or 9 years ago, and is now a tenant in its former home. (By the way, Pottsville also has a synagogue, Oheb Zedek, a synagogue that predates the Civil War, but now apparently has fewer than 50 members.)

Well, it’s interesting that a Jewish and a Black congregation share the worship space in Pottstown, because the premise of McBride’s book is a close relationship between the Blacks and Jews of the city almost 100 year ago. There are really three groups in the book – the Whites (all Presbyterians, it appears), the Blacks and the Jews. There is a neighborhood in the city, called Chicken Hill, near (but far from) downtown that used to be populated by Jews, but is now mainly Black, with only a few Jews choosing to remain, while most of the Jews have moved closer to downtown. The Jews are active business owners in Pottstown, although new “greenhorns” continually move to town; most of the Blacks work for others in the city, and some don’t work at all, and many of them have recently come from the South.

The two Presbyterians featured in the book are a corrupt city council president, and a doctor who marches each year in a Ku Klux Klan parade, covered by a sheet that far from hides his identity. The primary Jewish family include the husband who owns a live performance space (where Jewish and Black groups perform) and his wife, the daughter of the founder of the town’s synagogue, who runs the eponymous grocery store on Chicken Hill. They live above the store. (There are a few other Jews in the book, of course, including twin Lithuanian shoemakers, three Yiddish speaking railway workers, a cousin who owns a more successful live theater in Philadelphia, and Nir Rosen, a gangster pure and simple).

The Black characters are more numerous and more varied, and many have personal relationships with the Jews, and particularly with the owner of the Heaven and Earth Grocery.

It’s a remarkable book, very readable, sometimes reading like a collection of short stories, sometimes like a novel with one plot overarching everything else. The descriptions of the individual residents of Chicken Hill and elsewhere reads like Robert Sherwood’s Winesburg, Ohio. The overarching story, which tells the tale of an orphaned young Black boy who is deaf but far from dumb, and is hidden by the Jewish couple with the help of their Black neighbor, reads like a thriller.

This is a very good book, and was written, according to the author, to show that people of different races and backgrounds really can live together and appreciate each other. At least that’s true of the Blacks and Jews. The Presbyterians? That’s apparently another matter.