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526 12 Epilogue Massena, Zurich, Emanu-El By the end of the 1920s, the added weight of advancing years encumbered Marshall ’s dealings with the distant Holy Land. Before his death, the end of his term of high influence in communal affairs was perceptible in his difficulty traversing physical space and ideological gaps in dealings with the Zionists. Yet the effects of age and the liabilities of the consolidation of communal power in one leader made their heaviest showing not in Mandatory Palestine but rather in Massena, New York. While Marshall remained at the nerve center of Jewish affairs and was widely appreciated to the very end, isolation was inevitably brought on by exhaustion, stress, and age. This solitude was most cruelly felt not as a function of his physical distance from other significant loci of Jewish experience, such as the Zionists’ state-in-the-making. Toward the end of the 1920s, the Upstate New York idyll of his childhood memories sometimes also seemed remote. In autumn 1928, exactly when Marshall clinched the expanded Jewish Agency deal, he was compelled to do communal defense work in opposition to the most primitive of anti-Jewish insults in, of all places, Upstate New York. Marshall’s journey from upstate to Uptown was never deliberately one way. He had always tried to leave part of himself in Syracuse. Toward the end of his life, however, he seemed further from the tranquil reality of his own nineteenthcentury upstate youth than he intended to be and perhaps not at the infinite remove from the lachrymose medieval circumstances of the Jews’ collective past that he, and generations of Jewish activists and thinkers in the United States, imagined themselves to be. The Massena Blood Libel On September 22, 1928, a day before Yom Kippur eve, four-year-old Barbara Griffiths disappeared in marshy land outlying Massena, New York, an upstate Epilogue • 527 township of some 12,000 residents located just below the Canadian border in Saint Lawrence County.1 Massena was a conservative, Republican town whose Anglo-Saxon Protestant population mixed placidly with immigrant Poles, Italians , Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, and Greeks. The town’s nineteen Jewish families had all arrived after 1898. They prayed in an old Congregational church, which had been renamed Adath Israel, and fared fairly well economically, operating clothing, furniture, and jewelry stores. On the whole, the town had not dipped very deeply into the wells of Roaring Twenties’ prosperity. In the last years of the 1800s, health spas featuring the sulfurous water of the Raquette River had generated some income, whereas in the first decades of the twentieth century, the main employer in town was the Aluminum Company of America, Alcoa, where little Barbara’s struggling middle-class father, Dave, earned $35 a week as a shipping clerk. After the girl failed to return from the swampy “Nightingale Section,” Dave alerted local fire and police authorities, and a large search team was formed under the supervision of Company B state troopers from nearby Malone, New York, whose head was Corporal Harry “Mickey” McCann, an Irish Catholic World War I veteran with a high school degree. The police and volunteer search team worked in close cooperation with Massena’s mayor, W. Gilbert Hawes, a native of Tarrytown , New York, who had little education but had married well, monopolized the town’s bottled milk trade, and, surprisingly, won election as mayor in 1922, running as a Democrat in the Republican town (townsfolk surmised that voters confused this rather undistinguished candidate with members of another Hawes family, which ran a well-respected lumber business). After searchers came up empty handed, it was this impulsive former dairy manager who ordered McCann to focus the investigation on the possibility that local Jews had abducted Barbara Griffiths to use her blood for nefarious ritual purposes. The cue for the blood libel was apparently given by a Greek immigrant, Albert Comnas, who operated the Crystal Palace ice cream parlor in town. Troopers who took a soda break in Comnas’s establishment reportedly gleaned the theory that “the Jews are having a holiday, maybe they need blood,” from this Salonika native. As the weary and nervous troopers and the embittered proprietor mulled this age-old canard, they found an easy target for corroboration: Willie Shulkin, the mentally ill twenty-two-year son of Jacob Shulkin, the prospering owner of a few furniture and appliance stores in Upstate New York and the president of Massena’s Adath Israel congregation, had wandered into the...

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