The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) was an author and humorist whose 40-plus volumes famously combine high intellect with a raucousness and a Jewish redneck sensibility. His style was uncannily reminiscent of another writer of his time, an American, who also had a knack for satire and irony: Mark Twain. In Aleichem’s novel The Bloody Hoax (1913), a non-Jewish nobleman and a Jewish […]