The Bloody Hoax

Two friends who finished high school—one a Jew from a shtetl and the other a Russian nobleman from a prominent family—decided to play a risky joke: to exchange documents and live under another person’s name in an unfamiliar environment. For one of them, the Russian Popov, who becomes for a year Rabinovich, the prank turns out not to be entirely harmless. That is, in brief, the plot of Sholom-Aleichem’s novel “A Bloody Prank,” which he began writing in 1911 when he learned about the notorious “Beilis case,” and finished in January 1913—before Menachem-Mendl Beilis, falsely accused of a “ritual murder” of a Christian boy, was acquitted by a jury. Sholom-Aleichem wanted to publish “A Bloody Prank” in Russian, but during his lifetime it did not happen. This edition is the most complete and accurate translation of one of the best, yet still little-known works of a classic of Jewish literature in Russia.