The Blood Lie
Page 11
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:The carrying out of ritual murders is a law to the devout Jew…The blood of the victims is tapped by force. On Passover, it is used in wine and matzos… The family head empties a few drops of fresh or powdered blood into the glass, wets the fingers and blesses with it everything on the table. He then exclaims, “May all Gentiles perish, as the child whose blood is contained in the bread and wine.”…The Jew believes he absolves himself thus of his sins.
Although dates like 1928 and 1937 may seem like a lifetime ago, ritual murder accusations are anything but dead in the 21st 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?
The Blood Lie
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