History and the American Dream in James McBride “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store”

When Nana Nkweit asked James McBride how much discovering his Jewish background impacted his latest novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, McBride said that he discovered himself becoming “much more sensitized to the events of World War II than ever before.” He stated that his mother had cousins who died in he Holocaust, and he mentioned that at first he wanted to write a novel about African American servicemen liberating a concentration camp during World War II, conducting extensive research. However, he says, “[I] came to the realization that I’m not qualified to write about the holocaust. It’s too much. It’s too great.” Even though The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store does not directly confront the Holocaust, it does trace the connections between the Jim Crow United States, and here I extend Jim Crow to the North, and Nazi Germany in important ways. I don’t want to focus on that today because that is a discussion for a much longer project. Rather, I want to look at a passage near the middle of the novel where Moshe, Nate, Addie, and others leave Chona’s hospital room when she passes away.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a third person narrtaion, delving into the various actions of different characters. It takes place, for the most part, in the 1930s, but in a few moments, the narration breaks this…