A skeleton turns up in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1972, and the story goes back to Chicken Hill in the 1920s and 30s — the neighborhood where Jewish immigrants and Black families lived alongside each other on the wrong side of town. Moshe runs a theater, his wife Chona runs the grocery store of the title and won’t observe anyone’s rules about who gets served, and when the state comes for a deaf Black boy named Dodo the whole neighborhood conspires to hide him. It’s a novel about a community that protects its own across every line it was supposed to respect, and it’s very funny for a book with that much at stake.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store