The Trouble with Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

I read Heaven and Earth Grocery Store nearly a year ago, after it was recommended to me by friends, fellow readers, and the New York Times Book Review. But it’s been on my mind since I read it, for reasons I’ll cover soon.

For those not familiar, Heaven is nominally a murder mystery: in the 1970s, a skeleton is discovered at the bottom of a well, along with a belt buckle and a mezuza. How it got there is anyone’s guess. But the novel isn’t really about a murder, or a skeleton in a well. It’s a character-driven snapshot of Jewish-Black relations in the fictional working class neighborhood of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s and 30s. The characters are diverse: there’s Chona, a fiery-yet-kind Jewish grocery store proprietor and proto-feminist of sorts; her open-minded Romanian husband Moshe, who owns the local jazz theater; a black, deaf orphan named Dodo, and Malachi, a manic, acrobatic challah-baking chassid perpetually searching for a wife.

The book carefully highlights the distinct challenges that the Jews and Black people face, while also shining a light on the pernicious bigotries reserved for each. Ultimately, the story is fine, if a little pat, but I appreciated its narrative arc, and I got a real kick out of the diverse and well-drawn characters who populate Chicken Hill.

But here’s the problem: The book is profoundly riddled with errors about Jews — to the point of being nigh unreadable (to me, at least). As I made my way through the novel, I found myself disgustedly highlighting dozens of instances of egregious errors about Jewish ethos and practice. The mistakes range from the pithy — inaccuracies regarding Kashrut, Jewish dietary law — to the susbtantial, like mistakes around what Jewish holidays are, or what language our core texts are written in. Time after time, I’d turn to my wife and ask “Did they have anyone fact check this book? How could they possibly have published this?” The myriad errors twist and turn, wrapping around one another, like the braids of a chocolate babka.

I’ll start with some of the oddities around food.

McBride writes that Jewish travelers would need to resort to “eating cheese and eggs, unable to keep kosher on the Sabbath, just to be with their fellow Yids.” There are two issues here, one gastronomic, one grammatical. It’s not a custom for Jews to only keep kosher on the Sabbath. Keeping kosher is something you do seven days a week. Sure, it sounds like something observant Jews might do, but it isn’t. Moreover, this sentence uses the term “Yids” for the plural of Yid (“Jew,” in Yiddish). But the correct plural, and the one most commonly used, is “Yidden.” It’s possible that McBride wanted to reflect the anglicized nature of the Jewish-Americans by pluralizing “yid” with an “s,” but the sheer number of mistakes like this make me believe that this is oversight, rather than intention.

Continuing on, these Jewish travelers would arrive in Chicken Hill, and be served “hot tea in water glasses, fresh kosher eggs, gefilte fish, and challah bread.” Again, gastronomic mistakes abound. Here’s a biggie: there’s no such thing as kosher eggs. While there is no shortage of religious restrictions on food, fresh eggs (in addition to uncooked fruit or vegetables) are one of the primary examples of foods that can be purchased anywhere.

Moreover, while gefilte fish and challah are both commonly served together — on the Sabbath, and really only on the Sabbath. In fact, the very reason for Jews eating gefilta fish on the Sabbath comes from a religious stricture against removing bones from fish on Saturday. Although plenty of Jews might consume Challah during the week, its primary roll (pardon the pun), is during Shabbat.

These two issues, kosher-on-Shabbat, and prodigious Challah-baking, recur again throughout the book. Later on, a character is again referred to as “keeping kosher on the Sabbath,” and Malachi, the enigmatic Chassid, is said “deliver a loaf of his challah for Moshe to carry home to his wife.” He makes a similar error later, when he writes about “kosher milk,” which, again isn’t a stricture that Jews adhere to. A character is mentioned as having “chicken farm, selling eggs and kosher chickens.” The implication of this sentence is that he’s selling live chickens (if they were slaughtered or cooked, he’d have sold “kosher chicken”), which, again, isn’t a thing. All chickens are kosher until they’ve been slaughtered — it’s the ritual slaughter and subsequent treatment of the bird that renders it kosher or not. While, it’s possible that McBride intended his characters to confuse things, it seems like he has mishmashed religious minimalism (kosher on Shabbat) with religious maximalism (baking challah every day).

If McBride had only made these errors, dayenu!— it would have been enough. The problem isn’t just that he confuses food issues. He also makes fundamental mistakes about synagogues and Jewish texts and liturgy and holidays.

Chona’s father is known to have left Chicken Hill, since he wanted to “run a bigger temple” somewhere else. The problem is, rabbis don’t “run a temple.” They’d “be a rabbi at” at a given temple, where perhaps they’d run services, but they don’t run it in a real executive sense, the way a synagogue president might.

McBride also writes about the founding of the Jewish community in Chicken Hill, that, “After the seventeen families arrived and decided to build the shul, Reb suggested that Shad be put in charge of directing the building of their first-ever temple.” This sentence reads very duplicatively — a shul is a temple, why would you say that twice in one sentence? Now, it’s very possible that McBride wants the reader to know that a shul is a temple, and the latter half of the sentence serves to explicate the yiddish term “shul,” in the first half. But the problem, then, is that the sentence makes it seem as though a temple is a substructure of a synagoge/shul, and that Shad has been hired to build it. But obviously, it’s not, and the result is an odd reading that is of a piece with a lot of these well-meaning-but-misapplied structures of Judaism. I’ll close the synagogue door with one more example.

Chona, an ardent Orthodox Jew and avid Talmudist (more on this soon), is described as having “filled barrels from the town’s water spigot herself, and had the colored man walk the barrels into the unoccupied mikvah and pour the water into the baths.” Here again is another equivalent to kosher eggs— it’s something that sounds right, that sounds like something that Orthodox Jews might observe, but is actually very incorrect, to the point of being silly. In this instance, the fundamental tenet of a synagogue mikvah is that the water must be rainwater funneled into the mikvah itself, and is governed by rigid religious rules around how it can flow. The thought that an observant Jewish character might simply go to the town spigot and, like her predecessor in the biblical typescene, draw water, albeit for a mikvah, is very odd.

I’ll add another sociological detail, this one particularly troubling. In multiple instances, McBride mentions the Talmud, and, in particular, Chona’s affinity for it. Before I dive in, let me say that, like the book writ large, I love this idea. Too few women study the Talmud today, and I was absolutely jazzed about the prospect of a forceful female protagonist studying its pages, especially in Pennsylvania during the Roaring Twenties. The problem is that McBride doesn’t seem to know exactly what the Talmud is, or most damningly, what language the it’s written in. Consider this:

“The owner, a rabbi named Yakov Flohr, felt sorry for the young Romanian and offered to let Moshe study Hebrew from his Talmud, which he kept in the same storeroom where his youngest daughter Chona toiled.”

There are two problems here. The Talmud isn’t written in Hebrew, and it’s not a language textbook. It’s a 63-volume compendium of legal disputations and digressions, written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. This isn’t splitting hairs — no one who has studied the Talmud would ever say that it’s written in Hebrew. The letters are the same as Hebrew letters, but the syntax is different, sentence structure differs, some consonants have different sounds, and there is no punctuation.

This would make the Talmud a very odd choice for someone looking to learn Hebrew, since, well, it’s not Hebrew, and it would be a fool’s errand to try and learn Hebrew from it. McBride makes this error again later, when he writes:

“Some nights Moshe would arrive to find Addie seated by Chona’s bed and Chona asleep, the Talmud on her nightstand, her hand on the open page that she had selected for him to read. He’d nudge her awake and read aloud. She’d compliment his Hebrew, saying how beautiful it sounded, though they both knew it was horrible.”

Again, I wanted to like this. I really did. It’s tender, and it points to the love Moshe has for an ailing Chona, and Chona’s own intellectual verve. But, as I mentioned earlier, the Talmud isn’t something you read out of — it’s something one studies in an active sense, perhaps the way someone might study a physics textbook or a legal ruling in a law school course. This scene would work, if one conceives of the Talmud as a kind of compilation of Psalms. Had Chona had her hand on a page that read:

By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion.

There on the poplars
we hung up our lyres,

for our captors asked us there for songs,
our tormentors, for amusement:
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion….” (Psalm 137)

By golly that would be poignant! The problem is that the Talmud is not that. In McBride’s telling, Moshe would read Chona something like this:

“The Gemara asks: But isn’t it possible to be precise? The mishna need not be understood in that manner, since it is possible to calibrate the width of the spaces to equal the width of the unfit roofing, as the mishna required no more than that. Rabbi Ami said: The mishna is referring to a case where one extends the width of the spaces beyond the width of the unfit roofing. The mishna deems the sukka fit only if the width of the spaces is greater than the width of the unfit roofing.” (Sukkah 15b)

What person — however holy — would find that legal disputation comforting while ill?

The misuse continues. In a description of Reb, Chona’s father, he is noted as “a cheerful soul, a man of boundless enthusiasm, who believed the Talmud empowered him with the gift of making everyone around him happy and comfortable, including Negroes.”

This, again, is a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of a Jewish text. A sentiment like this has no basis whatsoever in Jewish ethos or practice. The Talmud doesn’t empower anyone with the gift of “making them (or people around them) happy and comfortable.” In fact, many yeshiva students might say that Talmud study is the opposite of “happy or comfortable.” It’s a galling, ludicrous mistake that McBride makes over and over and over again, throughout the book.

The errors continue.

Malachi, an enigmatic Chasid, is desribed as attending the dances at Moshe’s vibrant jazz hall. However, he “announced that he would not dance with any woman. Because he was looking for a wife.” As with the eggs and the synagogue and the Talmud, this sounds like something an Orthodox Jew might do. But McBride gets it wrong — the idea that an Orthodox man wouldn’t dance with a woman because he is looking for a wife is fanciful. An Orthodox man wouldn’t dance with a woman because, oftentimes, Orthodox men don’t touch women to whom they aren’t related. Full stop. I understand that McBride (intentionally or not) wants to inject romanticism into Malachi’s antics, but it’s simply a misunderstanding of Jewish law that sounds plausible in context.

There are further errors, around prayer and holidays, that are odd, but don’t necessarily merit mentioning.

To emphasize: I am aware that it is easy for me, as an Orthodox Jew, to pick apart a well-meaning book by a popular author and find issues with specifics. But the problem is that McBride takes these issues — kashrut, and Sabbath observance, and Talmud study, among others— and makes them a central part of protagonists’ identities, and of parts of the storyline. Did no one at Penguin Random House even Google some of these things during the editing process?

And this is what got to me, especially as I’ve chewed over the book in the last few months. I am deeply vexed by the fact that a book (a fine, though unexceptional book, to my mind) could be published with so many errors, especially in the 2020s.

The charitable interpretation is this: I think that people want to read good stories, and the idea of a narrative wherein Black people and Jews find common ground in the hills of rural Pennsylvania is inspiring. A line I found poignant: “There was nowhere to sit, no coffee to drink, no kind Presbyterian minister to offer words of solace. They just stood uncomfortably as the odd clump of Americans they were: Jews and blacks, standing together.” McBride is a skilled storyteller who weaves together the common humanity and shared experiences of his characters.

But I lament the fact that a book was put into the market — and received acclaim, particularly from Jewish literary organizations — with such profound and fundamental errors. At a time when the media, sometimes rightfully, places lot of scrutiny on the complexity and authenticity and ownership of cultural narratives, the sheer wrong-ness of Heaven makes it feel like the unalloyed adulation is a double standard, wherein Jewish narratives do not benefit from the same demands of accuracy.

And, lastly, no one spells it “Chona.” It’s Chana.