The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

Let me begin by emphasizing this book is an absolute banger, but in a subtle sort of way. It is fun and captivating, yet calm and measured at the same time.

The story follows residents of Chicken Hill, a poor neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the first part of the 20-th century. Both African-Americans and Jews live side-by-side (though they largely keep to themselves) battling against the many challenges thrown their way by the ruling elite of the town.

The heart of this novel is its realism. It present an array of characters that are neither entirely good nor bad. Some you like more, others less so. Some are simple, others unexpectedly complex. In reality, we all embody some superposition of good and bad qualities to varying degrees (even if we lose sight of this on social media). The characters in the novel embody this fact and come together to form a storyline that is as fluid as it is unpredictable.

I think its fair to say that when looking back on the past, people are generally quite bad at representing how things really were. Instead, probably because there is too much information to consider altogether or not enough information is known, we tend to collapse complex mental models into oversimplifications. Tolstoy dedicates a bunch of chapters of War and Peace¹ to investigate this calculous of history, particularly because he felt historians attributed too much praise to Napoleon for random outcomes during the Russian Campaign.

As the offspring of Jewish, Israeli emigrants to South Africa, I grew up in a not too dissimilar to that of the novel. I think the author did a spectacular job at using his characters to paint a vivid picture of the communities living on Chicken Hill, and, more interestingly, how they interact with each other.

Without giving away too much more of the novel, if you are tired or frustrated by the over-simplistic, polarizing way in which race is dealt with in the US but would like to read an entertaining novel that takes you back in time, I highly recommend this one.