"The dream came true in 1898. Ginsberg and Goldberg opened up a storefront in the town of Tupper Lake. Mose still peddled three days a week in Piercefield, where the International Paper Company had just opened a mill. Tupper Lake was a backwoods boomtown - 750 people, mostly French Canadian and mainly loggers, a roundhouse and two railroad crossings, and all the signs of a city on the roll.

"They got to know the loggers' wives who waited all year to get that one fat paycheck with which to do their shopping; the loggers themselves; the huge staff of guides and gardeners and carpenters at Paul Smith's hotel; the managers and the owners of the mills and the logging camps; and the railroad workers who passed through.

"As Tupper Lake grew, so did its fledgling Jewish community.... Among the new arrivals were a couple of English sisters named Fellman.... May Fellman worked for Mose for two years before he proposed to her. He liked to tell people he 'had' to do it - she was such a great worker that other storekeepers wanted to hire her, so it was to marry her or raise her salary.... The courtship was a swift one: 'I took her for a horse-and-buggy ride to Axton, twenty miles there and back. Proposed on the spot...'

"Then disaster struck in 1899: The entire town of Tupper Lake burned to the ground. 'A calamity. Tupper Lake was flat,' Ginsberg recalls.... [He] remembers gathering with the other Jews of Tupper Lake in a house in nearby Frenchtown to ponder their next move. Ginsberg and Goldberg had $10 of insurance for about $3000 worth of charred, useless stock....

"We stayed and bought a lot. Everything was done on credit. Local people lent me money." And he, in turn, extended credit to long-time customers who were also in distress....

"Five dollars paid the rent; another five covered household expenses for a month. Every day except Sunday you worked in the store till well after sundown, then walked home to a meal and a stroll. Everybody had a garden, remembers Ginsberg, and most everybody seemed to have a flock of hens in a side yard, and a piano in the parlor that was made in Burlington or Malone. The Jews of Tupper Lake tried valiantly in those early years to keep kosher, shipping up their meat in burlap sacks from Utica, salting it for hours in the sink.... And after dinner, when the dishes were dried and put away, you went for a stroll to hear someone practicing the Moonlight Sonata on the upright, or maybe to watch the log drivers work the shifting booms on the lake....'You never heard of taking a trip,' Ginsberg observes. 'Dances were in the home. Weddings, too. The home was the castle of the family. Every community was by itself. With a horse, you see, the farthest you could go was ten or twenty miles.'

"Around the turn of the century, the Jews of Tupper Lake region (by then 35 families strong) were ready to form their own congregation.... In those days the price for the modest-wood frame synagogue with pews and a wood-burning stove was a whopping $3500. Strapped for funds, Beth Joseph's founders asked for contributions from without. They weren't disappointed. A gentile thread magnate who summered in the area donated a couple hundred dollars, and many non-Jewish local businessmen chipped in as well....

"[Russian] local Jews felt free to appeal to the summer crowd [of aristocrats from New York who owned great camps along Raquette and Upper Saranac Lakes] in this time of need, and the German Jews were happy to respond. In 1906, the Beth Joseph synagogue was built , a rabbi hired to teach the children, and a kosher butcher employed to prepare the meat....

"That the Ginsbergs and their friends found some measure of tranquility in Tupper Lake did not mean the specter of anti-Semitism had wholly vanished from their lives....[A] genteel though no less repulsive form of social anti-Semitism was gaining fast acceptance in many of the region's hotels and clubs....Jews were not to be admitted. But Tupper Lake wasn't Placid, Saranac or Lake George. From the beginning it was a town of mixed ethnic origin - Jewish peddlers rubbing elbows with French Canadian lumberjacks, Yankee guides bumping whisky glasses with Swedish farmers....