The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

In June 1972, construction on Hayes Street in Pottstown uncovers a skeleton at the bottom of an old well on Chicken Hill. Pennsylvania State Troopers take a belt buckle, red cloth scraps, and a pendant to an elderly Jewish man living at the former synagogue site. He identifies the pendant as a mezuzah and needles the troopers’ assumptions, but their suspicion lingers. Before the investigation can progress, Hurricane Agnes floods the region, washing away the well and its evidence. The narration frames the storm as a kind of cosmic reckoning tied to earlier wrongs on Chicken Hill, and afterward the old man—Malachi—vanishes.

The story then moves back decades to the neighborhood’s earlier life. In the 1920s, Moshe Ludlow, a young Jewish immigrant with a gift for persuasion, runs the All-American Dance Hall and Theater in Pottstown. He hustles to book touring acts, including the demanding klezmer star Mickey Katz, but a botched, misunderstood ad campaign sparks fear in distant Jewish communities and nearly ruins Moshe financially. In the back room of the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, Moshe studies Hebrew with Rabbi Yakov Flohr and grows close to Yakov’s daughter, Chona Flohr, a witty, devout teenager living with a polio disability. Chona shares a Midrash story about infant Moses choosing burning coals over jewels—an emblem of survival through sacrifice—and Moshe takes it as a sign. They marry quickly and modestly, and Moshe salvages the Katz engagement into a run of packed, profitable nights.

Afterward, Moshe meets a mesmerizing Hasidic dancer who refuses to dance “without a wife,” then dances anyway and dazzles the crowd. The dancer gives Moshe slivovitz, and when both hear a sharp pop and see a puff of black smoke rising from Chicken Hill, the dancer calls it “a bad sign” and disappears.

As the years pass, Moshe expands his business by opening his theater to Black audiences, pushed by Chona’s plain insistence that money is money and dignity is dignity. Booking Chick Webb brings both new customers and new backlash: rival owners, town authorities, and even Moshe’s own synagogue harass him with inspections and fines. Moshe fights back through deals and persistence, aided by his worker Nate Timblin and by his powerful Philadelphia cousin Isaac Moskovitz. Moshe becomes superstitious about recurring “twelve” dreams he treats as private guidance, and his empire grows. Yet at home, the marriage strains over what success should mean. Chona refuses to abandon Chicken Hill or close the store; she writes outspoken letters against local injustice and treats neighbors—especially Black neighbors—as equals, even when it costs her.

In 1936, the twelfth year of their marriage, Chona develops a baffling illness with blackouts and stomach pain. Doctors cannot explain it; Moshe grows frantic and clingy, while the Black community sustains Chona with food, remedies, and presence. A Philadelphia specialist finally diagnoses a blood problem that caused a brain attack, and Chona slowly regains clarity but is left physically weakened. During her recovery, the mysterious dancer returns—now a struggling baker calling himself Malachi. He delivers daily challah, debates faith and American assimilation with Moshe, and alternates between wonder and volatility. His bakery fails, he voices harsh views about race, then abruptly asks Moshe to sell the bakery and vanishes for years, leaving Moshe unsettled and still haunted by the “bad sign” memory.

A new crisis overtakes everything: Nate asks Moshe for help protecting his young nephew Dodo (also identified as Holly Herring), a partially deaf Black boy orphaned after his mother’s death and targeted by the state for removal to a “special school.” Moshe agrees to hide Dodo in the theater basement, but Chona erupts at the cruelty of sending a child to sleep “with the rats” and orders Moshe to bring Dodo into their home. As neighbors gossip and watch for informants, the state man Carl Boydkins closes in. Chona, swallowing pride, asks her long-estranged childhood friend Bernice Davis for help. Bernice proposes a practical solution: cut a hidden hole in the fence and slip Dodo into Bernice’s crowded yard when the state comes, where “one colored looks just like the other.”

Meanwhile, Earl “Doc” Roberts—Pottstown’s local doctor—nurses a lifetime of bitterness rooted in his own polio-deformed foot, humiliations, and resentments toward immigrants and Chicken Hill. He aligns himself with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and becomes Boydkins’s tool: he is asked to examine the hidden boy so paperwork can send him to Pennhurst. Doc’s personal fixation on Chona deepens the threat. When Doc confronts Chona in the store, their argument escalates until Chona collapses into a seizure. While she lies unconscious, Doc assaults her. Dodo, hidden nearby and able to read lips, sees what is happening and attacks Doc to stop it. Addie Timblin rushes in to help Chona, neighbors gather, and Doc slips away—only to return with police and blame Dodo. Dodo flees across rooftops; a policeman’s grab ruins his jump, and he falls into darkness.

Dodo is sent to Pennhurst badly injured, sedated, stripped of his belongings, and labeled an “imbecile.” In Ward C-1—filthy, overcrowded, and predatory—he bonds with a severely disabled boy he privately names Monkey Pants. Without formal sign language, they invent a way to communicate, including a one-handed alphabet. Monkey Pants repeatedly warns Dodo to “play stupid” to survive. The danger becomes concrete when a powerful attendant, known as Son of Man, menaces Dodo and later attempts to assault him in the ward’s darkness. Monkey Pants’s violent seizure disrupts the attack, but by morning Monkey Pants has vanished, leaving Dodo more exposed.

Outside Pennhurst, Chona’s condition worsens after the assault. In the hospital she briefly awakens, asks where Dodo is, and shares a last fragile moment with Moshe before she dies, leaving Moshe devastated and the store’s future broken. Rumors swirl; Addie insists she saw what Doc did, while Nate warns that white authority will erase the truth. Nate’s grief hardens into a controlled rage. The community’s response becomes practical rather than legal: a rescue.

Patty Millison—called Paper—seeks help from Miggy Fludd, a Lowgod woman with Pennhurst connections who conducts “oracle” sessions on Hemlock Row. Miggy confirms Dodo is in Ward C-1 and warns that extracting him will require navigating Pennhurst’s internal power, including Son of Man’s reign. She points to old supply tunnels under the institution and to an egg-and-coffee delivery man, Bullis, who seems to move through those tunnels. Miggy also explains the institution’s cruelty in blunt detail, using the story of a disabled “duck boy” abused by Son of Man as proof that official oversight will not protect anyone inside.

At the same time, Isaac Moskovitz works his own angle. When Marvin Skrupskelis proposes blackmailing Pottstown boss Gus Plitzka over illegal water schemes to squeeze Doc, Isaac refuses; exposing corruption would also endanger the Chicken Hill synagogue’s own illicit water connection. Instead, Isaac cuts a quieter deal: Skrupskelis will recruit two Jewish union railroad men to be on the Pennhurst freight train so they can help remove Dodo during deliveries, and Isaac will handle the rest.

Nate sets the rescue in motion through careful, dangerous logistics. Using Anna Morse’s funeral home as cover, and coordinating with Miggy and Bullis, Nate infiltrates Pennhurst by hiding in Bullis’s delivery cart through a tunnel route. Son of Man confronts Bullis and attacks him; Nate emerges and, fearing what Son of Man will do to Dodo and what Nate himself may become if he fails, stabs Son of Man to death. The killing raises the stakes from rescue to manhunt, but Nate pushes forward, forcing Bullis to carry him upstairs disguised as a helper.

Elsewhere in Pottstown, unrelated corruption collides with the story’s opening mystery. On Memorial Day weekend, Fatty Davis and Enzo “Big Soap” Carissimi illegally reroute reservoir water to supply the synagogue. Their work breaks open the old well cover. That same night, Doc Roberts—drunk, wearing a red parade coat, and carrying a mezuzah pendant he took from Chona—stumbles through the lot. Henry Lit, a debt enforcer for Nig Rosen, mistakes Doc for Gus Plitzka and attacks him with brass knuckles. Doc falls into the open well and dies; unaware, Fatty and Big Soap later reseal the well with fresh concrete, burying Doc and the mezuzah together.

In the aftermath, the rescue succeeds through a coordinated network. Two Jewish refugee brakemen, Hirshel Koffler and Yigel Koffler, follow union boss Uri Guzinski’s orders to take Nate (also known as Nate Love) and Dodo onto the Pennsylvania Railroad freight line, drop them at Berwyn, and hand them to Pullman porters who spirit them onto passenger trains. Money and instructions move hand-to-hand through Chicken Hill—via Isaac, the Skrupskelis brothers, Bernice, Fatty, Addie, and Paper—turning small acts into a functioning underground pipeline.

Dodo is carried south to the Low Country of South Carolina, where he grows into adulthood as Nate Love II: a farmer, husband, father, and churchgoer. Much fades, but he retains enduring fragments—Chona’s marbles and warmth, and the memory of one steady finger held out to him in the dark. Years later, the network’s legacy includes support for disabled children through Camp Chona. Dodo dies on June 22, 1972, murmuring thanks to Monkey Pants—his death aligning with Hurricane Agnes and the erased evidence that began the book.