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Chia Messina

When author James McBride was 19, he stumbled upon a newspaper advertisement seeking a dish washer at a sleepaway camp for children with disabilities. He needed a job, so he applied.

McBride had no idea, then, that the four summers he would spend at the Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children in Worcester, Pa., would leave an indelible impression on his life — and become the foundation for his new <a href="https://amzn.to/3PtPP5p" target=_blank>novel</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/08/03/heaven-earth-grocery-store-james-mcbride-review/" target=_blank>“The Heaven &amp; Earth Grocery Store.”</a>

McBride started writing the book about 15 years ago, intending to set the story in a summer camp inspired by the Variety Club Camp. But, “like many works of fiction, it morphed into something else,” McBride writes in the novel’s acknowledgments.

Rather than a summer camp, the epic tale is set in Pottstown, Pa., in a Black, Jewish and immigrant neighborhood called Chicken Hill. Still, McBride expertly weaves the “lessons of inclusivity, love and acceptance” that he learned at the camp throughout the book, stringing together a truly soul-lifting, love-affirming story.

McBride sat down with The Washington Post to shed light on how his camp experience shaped his new novel — and him as a human being. (The interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Q: Like Chona in “<a href="https://amzn.to/3PtPP5p" target=_blank>The Heaven &amp; Earth Grocery Store</a>,” your Jewish grandmother — whom you never met — had a disability and worked in her family’s grocery store. How did you reimagine your grandmother as Chona in this book? What compelled you to do that?

A: My grandmother wasn’t in a marriage where there was love, so I put her on the page and made her loved. I garnered my grandmother’s story through my mother and through many of the old Black and Jewish people who lived in Suffolk, Va., who remembered her. They remembered her as very kind and very generous. They remembered her with great fondness, but they remembered her husband with great animosity.

Ultimately in fiction, when characters hit the page, they take on a life of their own. If a real person inspires a character, once that character gets started, the real person vanishes.

In a bigger sense, Chona is representative of some aspects of Jewish life that people don’t really pay that much attention to: kindness, philanthropy, generosity. We’re always talking about the evil and how different we are. We don’t talk about the kindness that we offer one another in our society. We are much more alike than we are different, no matter what our religion may be.

Q: In the acknowledgments, you explain that the book was dedicated to Sy Friend, the retired director of the Variety Club Camp. How did your experience at camp inspire parts of “The Heaven &amp; Earth Grocery Store?”

A: The land was donated by a Jewish theater owner back in the 1930s. I worked there for four summers, and what Sy really taught us, and what the children taught us, was equality. Love was the dominant force.

Camp taught me to question what is “normal.” Those kids were from all different races and religions, many of them from working-class backgrounds. They did not get caught up with a lot of the differences that most of us get caught up with. Sy was responsible for that. What Sy did for this book was he implanted the seed of equality and justice and fairness. That notion guides the entire book.

Q: How did you end up working at the camp?

A: I went to see an elderly man named Bill Saltzman, and after we talked, he called Sy and said: “I’ve got a boy here who’s too smart to be a dish washer. Make him a counselor.”

I didn’t know anything about differently abled children, I just wanted the job. When I first started, I didn’t think I could do it.

I fell in love with those kids. I’m still in touch with many of those campers. They gave me so much. Their philosophy, their ability to negotiate life with so much less than what I had — without complaint, and with a sense of joy — was something that I never forgot.

Q: The reader only learns about the camp near the end of the novel. Why didn’t you choose to set the story in the camp itself?

A: I started writing this book many years ago. But every time I wrote chapters about the camp, they just seemed corny and made up. It didn’t have any real muscle. There was no magic to the words.

The only chapter that really worked among the many chapters I’d written was the chapter about the person who donated the land for the camp, and that was Moshe. I discarded the chapters about the camp and just pushed right in at Moshe.

As soon as Chona arrived, I knew that I had some magic, and I just followed that. You can’t fall in love with your words, you have to fall in love with the ideas. And the idea of a love affair between these two people — one of whom was American and one of whom was born in Romania, both of whom were Jewish in a small town in Pennsylvania in the 1930s — I mean, that’s grist. That’s a good seed to work with.

Riverhead Books

Q: Why did you decide to set the story in the Chicken Hill neighborhood?

A: There just simply was no other place for it.

Chicken Hill tells the wider story of America from the perspective of people who really lived it, and you can’t do that when talking about a camp or an insane asylum, a hospital, a university or a library, because it doesn’t give you the range of characters that you need to tell the wider story of America. You have to have a setting where people come and go, and they move around, and they have freedom to express themselves and also freedom to walk away.

Q: What made the camp so significant in your life?

A: Sy will tell you that it was the campers who made the experience for all of us, and I would agree. But Sy was the conductor of the orchestra. The life affirmation that you come away with after an experience like that is life-changing. You get so much more back than you give.

Q: Characters with disabilities play leading roles in “The Heaven &amp; Earth Grocery Store.” Were some of the characters inspired by your campers?

A: Yeah, sure. I just grazed the tip of it with Monkey Pants and Dodo, in terms of showing how disabled children communicate; their gorgeous array of thoughts, the momentous intelligence they have.

Other than the physical challenges, they were just like any other children. Some were difficult and some were easy, but they all had a lot of love to give, and they had ways of showing their disapproval of things. They have an ability to mark your humanity in their mind in a way that you do not expect, and they have an ability to check you in ways that make you feel you better do better.

Courtesy of James McBride

Q: You mentioned the many lifelong lessons you learned at camp. What did Sy Friend teach you? And what did your campers teach you?

A: Mortality, life. You close your eyes and open them, and that’s how fast life goes. How you deal with the small bit of time you’re here; it’s just a blink. That was one lesson I learned. And humility. The humility that Sy had, the humility that the kids had. Being grateful for the smallest kindness; deeply grateful — not in a phony way.

There’s something about watching a kid with no hands and no feet eat an ice cream sandwich. It was like watching Jackson Pollock fling paint onto a canvas; it was just a work of art. It just speaks to the practicality of what humans are capable of doing; anything really is possible.

Camp was a great place. It changed my life.

Q: “Tikkun olam,” the Hebrew expression for “repairing the world,” is woven throughout the novel. Why?

A: I just love it; I love the innocence of it, I love the purity of it, and I love that it works. “Heal the world” is a big phrase. How do you heal the world? You start right where you are.

We have to heal the world first to save it.

Q: The book delves into racial divides and alliances, but ultimately, the dominant theme is community. A group of Jews, African Americans and immigrants set aside their differences and band together for a common cause. How can this book give readers hope about the future of American life?

A: A good novel should lead people to the future, not to the past.

Our commonalities far outweigh our differences, and that’s a fact. So we can fight each other over these minor differences, or we can celebrate our common ground and have a good time. How hard can that be?

If you know your neighbor, it’s hard to hate them. As poor as they were on Chicken Hill, they banded together because they couldn’t stand justice being denied anymore, and that’s how many of us feel now. The book is just trying to show people what it is to be right.

We emphasize the cynical too much. But the truth is, we’re driven by kindness and the moral sense that is the underpinning of the American Dream, in my opinion. That’s really what “The Heaven &amp; Earth Grocery Store” represents.

McGill University, BA

Columbia University, MS in journalism 

Sydney Page is a staff reporter who writes for The Washington Post’s Inspired Life section, a collection of stories about humanity. She has been a contributor to The Post since 2018.

Sydney Page

James McBride on Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

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