The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The novel tells the story of Black and Jewish residents of the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s and '30s.

The book opens in 1972, in the town of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where an excavation operation for a new housing complex inadvertently discovers a skeleton in the bottom of a well. Some items are found near the body, including a mezuza, which leads policeman to question the town's only Jewish resident, Malachi, who is living in a disused synagogue. But the investigation is hampered when the crime scene is washed away by Hurricane Agnes. The novel then goes back to 1920s and '30s Pottstown and details the lives of the town's residents in the mostly Black and Jewish Chicken Hill neighborhood. Two of the Jewish residents, husband and wife Moshe and Chona Ludlow, own a local theater with a dance hall and a grocery store (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store). One of the town's Black residents (who works for the Ludlows), Nate Timblin, asks the Ludlows to hide a young Black boy who is deaf, named Dodo, from the authorities who are seeking to institutionalize him in the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, a notorious mental asylum. The town's physician, also a member of the Ku Klux Klan, has racist and xenophobic motives and is favored by many of the white residents of the town in such policies. The Black and Jewish townspeople eventually mobilize to help the boy.

(From Wikipedia entry)