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Кровавая шутка
Выпускники гимназии - русский и еврей - затеяли извечный спор о том, есть ли антисемитизм в России, и в результате этого спора обменялись документами... Такова завязка самого неизвестного романа классика еврейской и мировой литературы Шолом-Алейхема.
Сюжет, навеянный знаменитым процессом Бейлиса, реалиями "черты оседлости" и "процентной нормы", видимо, долго оставался актуальным и в Советской стране. Во избежание навязчивых ассоциаций все собрания сочинений Шолом-Алейхема выходили у нас без "Кровавой шутки". Между первой и второй публикациями русского перевода романа, сделанного (в сокращенном варианте) Д.Гликманом, прошло полвека. А отдельным изданием на русском языке "Кровавая шутка" Шолом-Алейхема выходит после 1928 года впервые.
Сюжет, навеянный знаменитым процессом Бейлиса, реалиями "черты оседлости" и "процентной нормы", видимо, долго оставался актуальным и в Советской стране. Во избежание навязчивых ассоциаций все собрания сочинений Шолом-Алейхема выходили у нас без "Кровавой шутки". Между первой и второй публикациями русского перевода романа, сделанного (в сокращенном варианте) Д.Гликманом, прошло полвека. А отдельным изданием на русском языке "Кровавая шутка" Шолом-Алейхема выходит после 1928 года впервые.
- GenresRussia
270 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
48 people want to read
About the author
Sholom Aleichem
290 books187 followersRussian-born American humorist Sholem Aleichem or Sholom Aleichem, originally Solomon Rabinowitz, in Yiddish originally wrote stories and plays, the basis for the musical
Fiddler on the Roof
.
He wrote under the pen name, Hebrew for "peace be upon you."
From 1883, he produced more than forty volumes as a central figure in literature before 1890.
His notable narratives accurately described shtetl life with the naturalness of speech of his characters. Early critics focused on the cheerfulness of the characters, interpreted as a way of coping with adversity. Later critics saw a tragic side. Because of the similar style of the author with the pen name of Mark Twain, people often referred to Aleichem as the Jewish version of Twain. Both authors wrote for adults and children and lectured extensively in Europe and the United States.
He wrote under the pen name, Hebrew for "peace be upon you."
From 1883, he produced more than forty volumes as a central figure in literature before 1890.
His notable narratives accurately described shtetl life with the naturalness of speech of his characters. Early critics focused on the cheerfulness of the characters, interpreted as a way of coping with adversity. Later critics saw a tragic side. Because of the similar style of the author with the pen name of Mark Twain, people often referred to Aleichem as the Jewish version of Twain. Both authors wrote for adults and children and lectured extensively in Europe and the United States.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 30, 2025
Two recent gymnasium graduates Grigori Popov, a confident Russian nobleman’s son, and Hersh Rabinovitch, a cautious young Jew are having a drunken farewell dinner in a Kiev restaurant. They decide to trade identities for a year. Grigori will live “in Hershke’s skin” to discover what it feels like to be a Jew in tsarist Russia, complete with the residence restrictions, quotas, and ambient suspicion. Hersh, under Popov’s name, will enjoy the privileges of a Russian squire’s son. Their classmates solemnly swear to keep the secret.
The game turns serious the moment the “new” Hersh tries to rent a room from Sara Shapiro and her captivating daughter Betty, only to be told that Jews without special permits face expulsion. A single phrase, “I have a medal”, transforms suspicion into welcome, and Hershke-as-Popov begins navigating the social, romantic, and bureaucratic entanglements of his assumed life.
The exchange will ultimately lead one of them into the crosshairs of a ritual murder accusation echoing the real 1911 Beiliss trial, with its mix of police corruption, antisemitic hysteria, and courtroom theater.
The plot moves through university rooms with chairs missing their seats, streets where sausage-shop windows tempt hungers more urgent than scholarship, and parlors where gentile aristocrats, wealthy Jewish families, Bundists, and Zionists debate over tea.
Hershke and Grigori’s paths draw in Benny Hurvitch, a modern Jew steeped in tradition, and Betty Shapiro, who can spar in both Yiddish and Russian and is unimpressed by provincial pretension.
In one scene, Grigori-as-Hershke delivers a confused and hilarious history of Jewish exile that starts with Pharaoh and accidentally wanders into Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, winning roars of approval from his peers. In another, mumbled comments about residence permits carry the same weight as a summons from the tsar’s police.
Sholom Aleichem salts the satire with long, looping set pieces. Landlady–tenant negotiations, student debates on martyrdom, idle gossip about medalists, all edge the hoax toward its perilous consequences.
The book is a cousin to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons crossed with Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, but set in an empire where a bureaucratic stamp can determine the course of a life.
Its satire works through inversion: privilege in the hands of the disadvantaged, disadvantage in the hands of the privileged. The humor is dry and sometimes vaudeville broad, yet each scene carries the grit of early 20th-century Russian Jewish life, compkete with the smells of overcrowded flats, the petty cruelties of the Pale of Settlement, and the absurdities of officialdom.
Aleichem’s theatrical pacing and Dickensian relish for character types create a living fresco of pre-revolutionary society. The final impression is one of dangerous play: a wager on identity in a place where identity can kill. You are left with both a smile at the comic turns and a chill at how quickly the farce slides into a courtroom drama weighted with centuries of prejudice.
A police captain insists that Jews “breathe different air” and should remain in their own quarter, echoing the kind of pseudo-science still paraded as fact in certain corners. A café wit claims that “Jews look at the world sideways, as if plotting,” drawing roars of approval from his non-Jewish audience. A university gatekeeper tells Rabinovitch he must “wait until the Christian names are called” before he can approach, a scene that plays like a dry run for modern bureaucratic discrimination. A merchant warns his son never to “lend to a Jew without witnesses,” then adds that a clever one could still trick them, cementing prejudice as parental wisdom. A soldier, when pressed, swears he once met “a good Jew” but “that one was half Russian,” as if decency required dilution. Even the gentry join in, a hostess at a salon remarking that Jewish guests “should keep their laughter softer,” as though joy itself might offend.
The condescension, suspicion, and exclusion in these moments read less like Czarist Russian relics than blueprints. The police captain’s pseudo-science sits comfortably beside today’s conspiracy theories that frame Jews as biologically or culturally alien. The café wit’s smirking accusation of constant plotting could be dropped word-for-word into online comment threads that still trade in the myth of a global cabal. The gatekeeper’s quiet delay mirrors modern systems that bury bias in paperwork and process. The merchant’s fatherly counsel against trusting Jewish borrowers echoes in contemporary “jokes” about Jewish greed, while the soldier’s backhanded praise for a “half Russian” Jew finds its parallel in tokenistic claims of knowing “good ones” who serve as exceptions to the rule. Even the hostess’s injunction to temper Jewish joy recalls the current discomfort some express when Jews assert cultural pride or political self-determination in public spaces. And does anyone needs a reminder of antisemitic glee in universities??? The book’s satire catches the mechanics of prejudice so exactly that reading it today feels like overhearing an argument that never ended.
The blood libel sits at the core of the cruelty, a grotesque fiction treated by its peddlers as solemn truth. The accusation that Jews murder Christian children for ritual purposes is repeated with the gravitas of legal testimony, turning gossip into an instrument of terror. Characters speak of “the child’s body found in the Jewish quarter” as if location alone were proof, and witnesses manufacture details to satisfy an audience eager for spectacle. A local notable insists that “this has happened before, in other towns,” invoking an invented history to give the lie its authority. What makes the scenes sting today is their structural familiarity: the readiness to believe the worst Hamas lies without evidence, the public theatre of accusation, and the rush to codify suspicion into policy. In modern terms, it is the same viral logic that fuels online conspiracies, fabricated UN reports, kangaroo court lies, with myths gaining speed simply because they flatter prejudice and offers a story too sensational for its believers to release.
In The Bloody Hoax, every barb, insult, and manufactured charge points toward a single conclusion: a people without sovereignty live at the mercy of those who despise them. Sholom Aleichem lets the jokes land, but beneath the laughter runs a ledger of expulsions, quotas, blood libels, and casual humiliations that no amount of assimilation erases. The author's voice proudly insists that a return to the homeland is the sole condition for Jewish survival, a place where dignity does not depend on the goodwill of gatekeepers.
Written well before the Shoah, the novel’s portraits of clever endurance reveal their own fragility, showing that wit, adaptation, and cultural brilliance flourish only when anchored in security. Zionism, in this telling, emerges as the only barrier against the endlessly reinvented forms of the same old hatred, a verdict written in history’s own hand.
If I had to measure it, I’d call it a rare novel that manages to make you laugh out loud and wince in the same breath, which is precisely why it matters. This is an essential masterpiece!
"... Tell us, Rabinovitch, is this your diary?" Rabinovitch, who had already recognized the familiar, fat little book, nevertheless leafed through it and declared that, yes, it was his diary. The senior investigator with the energetic face adjusted his black pince-nez and asked the accused to be so kind as to clarify why he had written in his diary the following entry, which he then read in his customary slow manner, stressing almost every word: " 'HOORAH! TODAY I WENT TO SEE THEM BAKE MATZOS! I MYSELF WAS PRESENT TO SEE IT AND AM DELIGHTED, VERY DELIGHTED, THAT I WAS PRESENT' . . . Perhaps you can tell us exactly what you did there at the mazzah ceremony and why you were so delighted to have been present?" The accused did not immediately answer the question. He felt he ought first to give some introductory account of the agitation carried on recently in the newspapers, claiming that Jews used Christian blood in their mazzah for Passover. But they interrupted him before he got well under way and advised him not to involve himself in any irrelevant speculations and to answer immediately, briefly and to the point, the questions put to him: What did he do at the mazzah ceremony and why was he so happy that he himself was present? Briefly and to the point, he answered that he had attended the ceremony only to observe how they baked this bread that had such an ancient historic past surrounded with so terrible a legend. He was delighted that he had had the opportunity to see for himself how this mazzah was prepared, and once and for all to disprove the ugly stories about the so-called blood ritual. Rabinovitch was quite pleased with his fine, crisp response. Yet at the same time he was surprised to hear the older man say to the younger, "Written down?" "Written down," was the answer. The older one continued. "In your diary you go on," he drew out the words, " 'TOMORROW I GO TO THE RABBI ... I WILL SPEAK WITH HIM ABOUT DOGMA AND ABOUT RI-TU-AL.' " He drew out the last word as he folded his arms across his chest, leaned back in his chair, half shut his eyes, and waited for a reply. The other two also waited to hear what he would say. He didn't let them wait long, explaining that since he didn't feel sufficiently competent in religious dogma, he had wished to discuss the matter with an authority. "You aren't sufficiently competent in religious dogma?" the elder man interrupted, looking at his colleagues with wonderment. "You spend time with those who call themselves Chasseedim and still aren't sufficiently competent? How can that be, I ask you? Right here you yourself say in your diary" (reading), 'YESTERDAY I SPENT THE EVENING WITH CHASSID1M: Who are these Chassidim, as you call them? What sect do they belong to?" Rabinovitch did not lose heart and explained very calmly what the word Chassidim meant. He said that as far as he knew, Chassidim were not a sect at all, that Jews have never had sects. "If that is so, how come they all have different dances? Here in your diary you write" (reading) "I DANCED WITH ALL THE CHASSIDIM THEIR CHASSIDIM DANCE.' What do you mean by a Chassidim dance?" "It's an ordinary dance," he gave them to understand. "You drink a few glasses of whiskey and feel happy. Whoever can sing, sings. Whoever can't sing, claps his hands and the others stamp their feet." "Where was this and in what place did you become acquainted with this sect and can you name these people?" Our hero, whose calm had returned and who had been speaking confidently, again became rattled and speechless. To identify Shapiro's brother-in-law, in whose home he had so joyfully celebrated the Purim feast, would be to drag in innocent people who had no idea what was involved. And he tried to get around it: since this had happened so long ago, it seemed it was midwinter, he had forgotten. With a sarcastic smile the senior investigator listened carefully and cast a glance at his colleagues. "A pity that you have such a short memory—you could remember so many interesting things..."
The game turns serious the moment the “new” Hersh tries to rent a room from Sara Shapiro and her captivating daughter Betty, only to be told that Jews without special permits face expulsion. A single phrase, “I have a medal”, transforms suspicion into welcome, and Hershke-as-Popov begins navigating the social, romantic, and bureaucratic entanglements of his assumed life.
The exchange will ultimately lead one of them into the crosshairs of a ritual murder accusation echoing the real 1911 Beiliss trial, with its mix of police corruption, antisemitic hysteria, and courtroom theater.
The plot moves through university rooms with chairs missing their seats, streets where sausage-shop windows tempt hungers more urgent than scholarship, and parlors where gentile aristocrats, wealthy Jewish families, Bundists, and Zionists debate over tea.
Hershke and Grigori’s paths draw in Benny Hurvitch, a modern Jew steeped in tradition, and Betty Shapiro, who can spar in both Yiddish and Russian and is unimpressed by provincial pretension.
In one scene, Grigori-as-Hershke delivers a confused and hilarious history of Jewish exile that starts with Pharaoh and accidentally wanders into Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, winning roars of approval from his peers. In another, mumbled comments about residence permits carry the same weight as a summons from the tsar’s police.
Sholom Aleichem salts the satire with long, looping set pieces. Landlady–tenant negotiations, student debates on martyrdom, idle gossip about medalists, all edge the hoax toward its perilous consequences.
The book is a cousin to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons crossed with Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, but set in an empire where a bureaucratic stamp can determine the course of a life.
Its satire works through inversion: privilege in the hands of the disadvantaged, disadvantage in the hands of the privileged. The humor is dry and sometimes vaudeville broad, yet each scene carries the grit of early 20th-century Russian Jewish life, compkete with the smells of overcrowded flats, the petty cruelties of the Pale of Settlement, and the absurdities of officialdom.
Aleichem’s theatrical pacing and Dickensian relish for character types create a living fresco of pre-revolutionary society. The final impression is one of dangerous play: a wager on identity in a place where identity can kill. You are left with both a smile at the comic turns and a chill at how quickly the farce slides into a courtroom drama weighted with centuries of prejudice.
A police captain insists that Jews “breathe different air” and should remain in their own quarter, echoing the kind of pseudo-science still paraded as fact in certain corners. A café wit claims that “Jews look at the world sideways, as if plotting,” drawing roars of approval from his non-Jewish audience. A university gatekeeper tells Rabinovitch he must “wait until the Christian names are called” before he can approach, a scene that plays like a dry run for modern bureaucratic discrimination. A merchant warns his son never to “lend to a Jew without witnesses,” then adds that a clever one could still trick them, cementing prejudice as parental wisdom. A soldier, when pressed, swears he once met “a good Jew” but “that one was half Russian,” as if decency required dilution. Even the gentry join in, a hostess at a salon remarking that Jewish guests “should keep their laughter softer,” as though joy itself might offend.
The condescension, suspicion, and exclusion in these moments read less like Czarist Russian relics than blueprints. The police captain’s pseudo-science sits comfortably beside today’s conspiracy theories that frame Jews as biologically or culturally alien. The café wit’s smirking accusation of constant plotting could be dropped word-for-word into online comment threads that still trade in the myth of a global cabal. The gatekeeper’s quiet delay mirrors modern systems that bury bias in paperwork and process. The merchant’s fatherly counsel against trusting Jewish borrowers echoes in contemporary “jokes” about Jewish greed, while the soldier’s backhanded praise for a “half Russian” Jew finds its parallel in tokenistic claims of knowing “good ones” who serve as exceptions to the rule. Even the hostess’s injunction to temper Jewish joy recalls the current discomfort some express when Jews assert cultural pride or political self-determination in public spaces. And does anyone needs a reminder of antisemitic glee in universities??? The book’s satire catches the mechanics of prejudice so exactly that reading it today feels like overhearing an argument that never ended.
The blood libel sits at the core of the cruelty, a grotesque fiction treated by its peddlers as solemn truth. The accusation that Jews murder Christian children for ritual purposes is repeated with the gravitas of legal testimony, turning gossip into an instrument of terror. Characters speak of “the child’s body found in the Jewish quarter” as if location alone were proof, and witnesses manufacture details to satisfy an audience eager for spectacle. A local notable insists that “this has happened before, in other towns,” invoking an invented history to give the lie its authority. What makes the scenes sting today is their structural familiarity: the readiness to believe the worst Hamas lies without evidence, the public theatre of accusation, and the rush to codify suspicion into policy. In modern terms, it is the same viral logic that fuels online conspiracies, fabricated UN reports, kangaroo court lies, with myths gaining speed simply because they flatter prejudice and offers a story too sensational for its believers to release.
In The Bloody Hoax, every barb, insult, and manufactured charge points toward a single conclusion: a people without sovereignty live at the mercy of those who despise them. Sholom Aleichem lets the jokes land, but beneath the laughter runs a ledger of expulsions, quotas, blood libels, and casual humiliations that no amount of assimilation erases. The author's voice proudly insists that a return to the homeland is the sole condition for Jewish survival, a place where dignity does not depend on the goodwill of gatekeepers.
Written well before the Shoah, the novel’s portraits of clever endurance reveal their own fragility, showing that wit, adaptation, and cultural brilliance flourish only when anchored in security. Zionism, in this telling, emerges as the only barrier against the endlessly reinvented forms of the same old hatred, a verdict written in history’s own hand.
If I had to measure it, I’d call it a rare novel that manages to make you laugh out loud and wince in the same breath, which is precisely why it matters. This is an essential masterpiece!
"... Tell us, Rabinovitch, is this your diary?" Rabinovitch, who had already recognized the familiar, fat little book, nevertheless leafed through it and declared that, yes, it was his diary. The senior investigator with the energetic face adjusted his black pince-nez and asked the accused to be so kind as to clarify why he had written in his diary the following entry, which he then read in his customary slow manner, stressing almost every word: " 'HOORAH! TODAY I WENT TO SEE THEM BAKE MATZOS! I MYSELF WAS PRESENT TO SEE IT AND AM DELIGHTED, VERY DELIGHTED, THAT I WAS PRESENT' . . . Perhaps you can tell us exactly what you did there at the mazzah ceremony and why you were so delighted to have been present?" The accused did not immediately answer the question. He felt he ought first to give some introductory account of the agitation carried on recently in the newspapers, claiming that Jews used Christian blood in their mazzah for Passover. But they interrupted him before he got well under way and advised him not to involve himself in any irrelevant speculations and to answer immediately, briefly and to the point, the questions put to him: What did he do at the mazzah ceremony and why was he so happy that he himself was present? Briefly and to the point, he answered that he had attended the ceremony only to observe how they baked this bread that had such an ancient historic past surrounded with so terrible a legend. He was delighted that he had had the opportunity to see for himself how this mazzah was prepared, and once and for all to disprove the ugly stories about the so-called blood ritual. Rabinovitch was quite pleased with his fine, crisp response. Yet at the same time he was surprised to hear the older man say to the younger, "Written down?" "Written down," was the answer. The older one continued. "In your diary you go on," he drew out the words, " 'TOMORROW I GO TO THE RABBI ... I WILL SPEAK WITH HIM ABOUT DOGMA AND ABOUT RI-TU-AL.' " He drew out the last word as he folded his arms across his chest, leaned back in his chair, half shut his eyes, and waited for a reply. The other two also waited to hear what he would say. He didn't let them wait long, explaining that since he didn't feel sufficiently competent in religious dogma, he had wished to discuss the matter with an authority. "You aren't sufficiently competent in religious dogma?" the elder man interrupted, looking at his colleagues with wonderment. "You spend time with those who call themselves Chasseedim and still aren't sufficiently competent? How can that be, I ask you? Right here you yourself say in your diary" (reading), 'YESTERDAY I SPENT THE EVENING WITH CHASSID1M: Who are these Chassidim, as you call them? What sect do they belong to?" Rabinovitch did not lose heart and explained very calmly what the word Chassidim meant. He said that as far as he knew, Chassidim were not a sect at all, that Jews have never had sects. "If that is so, how come they all have different dances? Here in your diary you write" (reading) "I DANCED WITH ALL THE CHASSIDIM THEIR CHASSIDIM DANCE.' What do you mean by a Chassidim dance?" "It's an ordinary dance," he gave them to understand. "You drink a few glasses of whiskey and feel happy. Whoever can sing, sings. Whoever can't sing, claps his hands and the others stamp their feet." "Where was this and in what place did you become acquainted with this sect and can you name these people?" Our hero, whose calm had returned and who had been speaking confidently, again became rattled and speechless. To identify Shapiro's brother-in-law, in whose home he had so joyfully celebrated the Purim feast, would be to drag in innocent people who had no idea what was involved. And he tried to get around it: since this had happened so long ago, it seemed it was midwinter, he had forgotten. With a sarcastic smile the senior investigator listened carefully and cast a glance at his colleagues. "A pity that you have such a short memory—you could remember so many interesting things..."
September 23, 2021
I loved loved loved THE BLOODY HOAX! The Prince and the Pauper but with a Blood Libel? What a fantastic twist! Popov and Rabinovic are a Russian gentile of noble blood and a Jew who switch places for a year because Popov believes Jews are exaggerating when they say they have a hard time getting into university and succeeding in society. He's determined to prove Rabinovic wrong. Popov quickly discovers residence permits, police raids, university quotas, and libels, and all through it Sholom Aleichem shows us the stubborn way in which Popov holds onto his noble privilege, his inability to believe the police would be anything but honest, and his nagging belief that maybe, just maybe, the Christian blood in matzoh thing is real, until he manages to disprove this myth for himself. Even when he is accused of killing a Christian boy to make matzoh, Popov believes the truth will come out and he'll be freed. SPOILER: He is not freed by the truth that the "blood ritual" is a myth, but by his noble wealthy father saving him from trial and the case being dropped because he is not a Jew. There is no happy ending here for the Jews. Aleichem knows this. Even while Rabinovic lived as a gentile for the year, he felt guilty about it the whole time. In the end he is a Jew and Popov is not and that's the way it is. One of my favorite moments in this book reminded me of Jews on twitter: after the blood ritual accusation, the local Jews make fun of it by debating, Talmud-style, the ins and outs and laws of picking a Christian child, how to kill him, what the best recipe might be, etc. It is 2021 and nothing has changed since the 19th century when it comes to insane accusations and myths and the way we as Jews joke about it to cope.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 9, 2012
Really well written... but the aftertaste remains: и морду России всё равно набить хочется
April 2, 2021
Tāda parasta mierīga grāmata, no sākuma līdz beigām..
June 24, 2021
the ending was really disappointing for me. i thought the final will be epic ☹️
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 10, 2017
You can't fight racism highlighting the advantages of one race above another. The author did very this thing. I don't like it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews