Fiddler at the Dark Town Strutters’ Ball: The Ligaments of Fairy Tale
There is an ancient legend of urban strife between blacks and Jews that reached its Golden Age in the early 1960s with Norman Podhoretz and James Baldwin and kept chugging along through Malcolm X to Gavin Cato and Yankl Rosenbaum. In James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, set mainly in the calendar year 1936, that myth gets parted like the Red Sea. Instead of at one another’s throats, “They just stood uncomfortably as the odd clump of Americans they were: Jews and blacks, standing together,” McBride writes. He binds their mode of life through metaphor, “like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or éru West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore.” McBride offers a world where the two groups learn from one another, intertwine their dense historical experiences, and rewrite the tale of what it means to be American. The idea here is as straightforward as it is contemporary as it bends back against itself: couldn’t America be America if the marginalized banded together and defeated their racist persecutors? Who are also the rapists, the industrialists, the sexists, the heartless political machines, and the Nazis? And shouldn’t the Jews, the most telescopically persecuted, take the lead role? For this a new tale has to be spun.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store recuperates antecedents of this world that would be inaccessible to people like myself, born in the 1960s. Moses McBride takes his reader out of Egypt and to the water with a period romance detailing the turn-of-the-old-century migrations of the eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jews and black migrants from the plantation South who once fully redefined the urban world of the eastern seaboard. Set in the Chicken Hill district of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a morality play, an allegory, and a murder-mystery.
A noteworthy storyteller, McBride recounts how it all started when Moshe, a forlorn Romanian migrant and jazz-promoting theater owner, captured the heart of the beautiful and injured Chona, a true American heroine of Pottstown, found working in the storeroom of the town’s sole Jewish grocery, operated by her rabbi father. Addled by illness and affliction, Chona conducts “every act of living” as an occasion “to improve the world.” Despite the difference in the length of her legs, she is without “an ounce of bitterness or a shred of shame.” Refusing “to play by the rules of American society” and despite her relative affluence, she rejects flight from all-black Chicken Hill for downtown where the luxuries of whiteness await. Giving away food to the local black people from her grocery store during the years of the Depression, she is a saintly “artery to freedom.” On top of that, she adopts Dodo, a mute neighbor whose mother has been killed in an accident and who needs shelter from prying state officials seeking to lock him away in Pennhurst Sanitorium.
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