The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

Content Warning: This section of the guide references antisemitism and xenophobia.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there was a mass migration from Eastern Europe to the United States, and many Jewish immigrants settled in Philadelphia. By the late 1880s, the city had a distinct Jewish quarter in the area that is now Society Hill and Queen Village. The majority of the immigrants found work in the more than 100 sweatshops in the area or in the quarter’s bustling markets:

Seen on the pavement of the new S. 4th Street pavement market were pickle barrels and union enforcers, dreamers and paupers, curbside bookies and curbside elections, saloons, pool halls and feed stores—and in the middle of all this excitement were the synagogues, dozens of them (Boonin, Harry. “The Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia.” City of Philadelphia, 5 Mar. 2008).

Four synagogues from the original Jewish quarter remain standing to this day even as the population has shifted. After 1900, some Jewish families who found financial success moved to West Philadelphia. Congress’s 1924 decision to halt immigration from Eastern Europe also diminished the population of the Jewish quarter.

In the 1930s, Jewish refugees from Germany started arriving, and antisemitic groups began to appear in the United States. A 1937 survey showed 4,771,000 Jewish people in the United States belonging to 3,728 congregations. Due to the poor working conditions many Jewish laborers faced, Philadelphia’s Jewish quarter became a “center for labor organizing, leading to workers associations and unions for a variety of occupations including bakers, men’s clothing tailors, and ritual slaughterers who worked in kosher butcher plants” (Klaczynska, Barbara. “Immigration (1870-1930).” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2014). McBride weaves the Jewish community’s history of activism into his novel by including the Jewish union railroad workers who help Dodo and Nate escape from Pennhurst. Like their historical counterparts, the Jewish characters in James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store face xenophobia and antisemitism as they create new lives and a community for themselves in Pennsylvania.