Sholem Aleichem. A Bloody Joke (Novel)

The history of Sholem Aleichem's voluminous novel is no less fascinating than its content. It was translated into Russian three times—before the Revolution, in 1928 in Russia, and in the 1970s in Israel. The pre-Revolutionary translation was never published; the Soviet version halved the text. The Israeli edition, however, was published in a microscopic print run. And only now, when virtually no Yiddish translators remain, has this half-forgotten novel been published in Russian—in its entirety for the first time in Russia. And what of the novel itself? Certainly, it's not as brilliant as, say, "Wandering Stars," but it's remarkable in its own way, and the plot itself (for the 1910s) is unusual. Two friends, high school graduates—a Jew from a small town and a Russian nobleman from a distinguished family—decided to play a risky prank: exchange documents and live under false names in an unfamiliar environment. For one of them, the Russian Popov, who became Rabinovich for a year, the prank turns out to be anything but harmless. This, in brief, is the plot of Sholem Aleichem's novel "The Bloody Joke," which he began writing in 1911, upon learning of the notorious "Beilis affair," and completed in January 1913, before Menachem Mendel Beilis, falsely accused of the "ritual murder" of a Christian boy, was acquitted by a jury. Sholem Aleichem intended to publish "The Bloody Joke" in Russian, but this never happened during his lifetime. This edition is the most complete and accurate translation of one of the finest, yet still little-known in Russia, works by this classic of Jewish literature.