January 16, 2025
I promised myself this year that I would read more BIPOC literature, and a patient I was helping at work strongly recommended this book to me. I got it as an audiobook, and now I understand her enthusiasm. This book is already on many lists as a classically fantastic American novel.
Fundamentally, America is a country of immigrants, both willing and unwilling. Slavery isn’t a distant memory and the citizens of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania had grandparents who were slaves in the South. Jewish, black and immigrant families are residents of Chicken Hill, banding together and protecting each other in the name of adversity and community.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is the center of the story, providing a place of refuge and community provided welfare to help the citizens. The owners, Moshe and Chona Ludlow are Jewish and keenly aware of the struggles to find work and the rising threat of the KKK by white men in the town. Chona and Moshe are keenly aware of the adversity to their neighbors and do everything they can to help protect each other.
What is striking about the book is the layers built up throughout the chapters of relationships, however unlikely, between different ethnic groups. It exemplifies the growing pains of a country that still welcomes and shelters immigrants from increased conflict in Europe, and how these immigrants in a small community find common ground. The reader is reminded of how their ancestors may have come to America and found their ground, and how it takes a welcome from people similar to them but at the same time different. The book is a picture of America, a microcosm.
“Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.”
Because banding together in the face of adversity is a central pillar of the book, a common enemy discovered among the main characters is quite predictable: white men with authority. In this instance, the two perpetrators are a white doctor with a grudge against Chona, and a representative of the state who’s aim is to disrupt the community and bring in a young deaf boy the town is rallying around to protect. At the height of racial conflict, white American man is pitted against black and Jewish men and women, and it seems as though the white man gets his way.
This book is a prime example of what America went through to get where it is today. It tells us that community is as important as ever, and that overcoming and embracing our backgrounds and differences is pivotal to survival. The author may have set it in 20s and 30’s Pennsylvania, but you can see the similarities to our own communities in 2025. As we can see in daily life and in the news, we still have a long way to go.
New York Times Bestseller, 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR/FRESH AIR, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, AND TIME MAGAZINE
To purchase a copy, please consider purchasing from bookshop.org. Each purchase supports a local independent bookstore. I am supporting Rooted.MKE, a woman and BIPOC owned childrens bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You can find your copy here!
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