The Blood Lie (17 page)

“Why would anyone do such wicked things?” Emaline asked. “I feel like this is all my fault, all because I couldn't manage to get home for Saturday lunch on time.” She turned her head away, and the movement let a ray of sun catch her necklace, a gold cross on a chain.

“It's not your fault.” Jack tried to think of something else to say, but Emaline's pendant commandeered his attention. The crucifix. It's what stood between Emaline and him, like an electrified fence, all glittery and metallic and masquerading as jewelry.

“What are you looking at?”

“I, nothing. It's just, your necklace. It's…nice.”

“This?” She held up the cross. “This is a crucifix.”

“Oh. I mean, yes.”

“My father gave it to me when I took my first communion, did I ever tell you that?”

She slid her fingers over the chain.

“No. I mean, maybe. Sorry, I didn't mean to make you—”

“It's fine, really.”

Emaline glanced behind her to see if anyone was around. The ticket master was smoking a cigarette on the bench outside the station, but he was busy reading the paper, so she went ahead and touched his fingers. He clutched her hand fast and stared full-on into her topaz eyes. They didn't speak for a moment.

“Thanks for coming,” he said at last. “I'll need all the luck I can get.”

“I really shouldn't be wishing you any luck at all, you know. Why should I, when I don't want you to go?”

Jack's mouth opened a sliver.

“Look, I know you want—you need—to go,” she said. “But the honest, selfish truth is, I don't want you to leave me, Jack. I don't want you to.”

Jack felt his body sway like a buoy under the force of her words. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her more than anything. He wanted to take her cool, creamy hands in his and bury his face in her copper-flecked hair. He wanted to mold his body to hers. But the ticket master was right behind them, and who knew when Emaline's mother might show up? He couldn't.

“I'll only go if I get in,” he said. “And that might not happen.”

She forced a smile. “With your talent? You're a shoe-in.” She gripped his hand tighter, and his pulse skittered. “I'm sure of it.”

Don't let go
, Jack silently pleaded.
Whatever you do, Emaline, don't let go of my hand. Not yet. Please.

She did a quick little shake of her head as if to flick away some tears and changed the subject. “By the way, do you have a date for the fall festival dance yet?” she asked.

“Only in my dreams.”

“Well, I have an idea.” She let her thumb slide across the back of his hand. “Why don't you ask Sarah Gelman?”

Jack's eyes grew large. “S-Sarah?”

“I think she'd love to be your date. She's crazy about you.”

“I…yeah, Harry says the same thing. It's just that—”

“Jack, listen to me. I'd do anything if you and I could go together, you know that. Anything at all if we could walk arm in arm into the gymnasium and dance the night away, just the two of us.”

“Me too.”

“I hate it, hate it with all my heart that we can't. Still, it doesn't mean you have to stay home, does it? Come on, I'll help you pick out a corsage for Sarah. You'll pin it right here on her.” She tapped Jack's chest, which flamed at her touch. “And you've already got this handsome suit. You're all set.”

“Does this mean you're going to the dance with George?”

Emaline opened her mouth to speak, but a horn blast from down the track drowned her words.

They both turned to watch the steely black train speed their way. In a tumult of wind and heat, it screeched to a stop, wrapping them in a dense swirl of smoke. For a moment, the exhaust was so thick they couldn't see the ticket master behind them or the conductor in front of them. That's when they kissed. A sweet, lingering, too brief kiss. In broad daylight. With other people only yards away. For the first and the last time.

They didn't say goodbye. The train doors clanged open, and Jack simply picked up his cello and boarded the passenger car. Emaline and the skinny little dog watched as the train started out, but Jack couldn't bring himself to look back at them. He had to keep looking forward. It was the only way.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In a Russian village many years ago, the butcher's son was found stabbed to death on the shop floor. The butcher ran to the judge and said, “It must be a Jew! A Jew must have murdered my son and taken his blood to make Sabbath cakes.”

The judge summoned the rabbi to stand trial, and since there was no evidence, he declared, “We'll settle this case the simple way. On one slip of paper, I'll write the word guilty, and the other I'll leave blank. If the rabbi draws the guilty paper, he shall burn at the stake. If he draws the blank paper, he and his people will go free.”

The judge wrote guilty on both slips before placing them in a hat. But the rabbi was wise. When he drew one of the papers, he immediately popped it into his mouth and swallowed it.

“How dare you!” screamed the judge. “Now how are we to tell which paper you drew?”

“Just check the one left in the hat,” answered the rabbi. He withdrew the remaining paper and showed the judge that it said guilty. “Here!” the rabbi said. “Since this one says guilty, I must have swallowed the blank one.” And so the judge was forced by his own decree to free the rabbi.

Several weeks later the butcher, wracked with guilt, confessed that he himself had killed his son with a meat cleaver in a fit of rage over a lost ruble.

My yarn-spinning uncle told me that folktale when I was a child. I remember thinking,
thank goodness it's only a story
—
nothing like that ever really happens.
It never dawned on me that blood lies might exist outside of fairy tales.

Flash forward to my sophomore year of college. I was taking a sociology class called “Community Decision-Making.” The professor sent us home for Thanksgiving with an assignment. Wherever we were trekking off to, we had to identify a local controversy—past or present—and write a paper about how the involved groups made their decisions.

The prof said that students usually covered Town Meeting types of issues for this assignment—water fluoridation, school budget overrides, Halloween night curfews and the like. He encouraged us to look beyond the obvious.

Off I drove to my small hometown in northern New York, thinking (a) I can't believe I have to write a paper over vacation, and (b) nothing interesting or controversial ever happens in Massena, so how am I going to come up with a topic?

I explained—rather, complained about—my predicament to my dad. He'd grown up in Massena, so I figured he'd know if anything contentious had ever come up. We sat down at our kitchen table with mugs of my mother's famous hot chocolate, and he told me, for the first time, about an extraordinary confrontation that erupted in our mild-mannered village when
he was a senior in high school. It was that story which led to this book.

The incident portrayed in this novel was inspired by a real blood libel that took place when a small girl disappeared from Massena in 1928, and an innocent Jewish boy was called a murderer. The next week, after the girl was found,
The New York Times
published a letter written by American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall to the mayor of Massena. Under the title “Reported Incident in Upstate Village is Declared First of Kind in This Country,” Mr. Marshall said he was responding to “an attempt to plant on American soil the barbarous ritual murder accusation against the Jews.” His letter expressed the indignation and anguish that the blood lie had caused the Jewish community.

Nothing about the incident ran in the
Massena Observer
. Although the event garnered some press at the time, it was mostly kept quiet. My purpose in writing
The Blood Lie
was to unbury this dark episode of American history. While I have imagined details and personalities, I have preserved the essence of the story. The Massena blood libel never should have happened, but it did, and the only good that can come of it is through the telling and remembering.

Five years after the blood lie in Massena, Hitler took power in Germany and began using the blood lie to justify the oppression and ultimate slaughter of the Jews. In 1937,
Der Sturmer
, a popular Nazi newspaper, even published a special ritual murder edition. Here's an excerpt:

Although dates like 1928 and 1937 may seem like a lifetime ago, ritual murder accusations are anything but dead in the 21
^st
century. In 2002, for instance, a student demonstration at San Francisco State University featured posters of a soup can whose label showed dripping blood, a dead baby with its stomach sliced open, and the words “Made in Israel, Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license.” That same year, a Saudi newspaper ran an article describing how “Jewish vampires” extract the blood of teenagers to use in their Purim holiday pastries.

Shortly before Passover 2008, Russia's third largest city was plastered with posters claiming that Jews were “stealing small children and draining their blood to make their sacred bread.” Also in recent years, Swedish and Canadian newspapers have published stories claiming that Jews kidnap and kill children in order to harvest and sell their internal organs.

Clearly, the blood lie is alive and well in our world. So is hatred against other groups based on their race, religion, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. From cyber-bullying to violent physical attacks, vandalism to murder, oppression is out there. In 2004 alone, there were more than 9,000 reported hate offenses in the
U.S., according to the FBI. That doesn't include all the incidents that go unreported—the name-calling, exclusion, intimidation, property destruction and other offenses that people don't talk about.

I wonder if Jack Pool would be surprised at the prevalence of hate crimes today. Are you?

Copyright © 2011 by Shirley Reva Vernick

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations for reviews. For information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901 or call at (915) 838-1625.

 

 

The poem “Sorrow,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay appears in
The Blood Lie.

From
Renascence and Other Poems
by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper, 1917).

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Summary: In 1928 in Massena, New York, Jewish sixteen-year-old Jack Pool, in love with his Christian neighbor, is accused of killling her little sister for a blood sacrifice.

eISBN : 978-1-935-95513-9

2011011429