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Pin the Hat on Sholem Shachne

Alona Bach


Once upon a 1913, a merchant from Kasrilevke interrupted a certain Mr. Sholem Aleichem to tell him a story about hapless hero Sholem Shakhne’s absent-minded train journey, in which he famously did not recognize himself when he mistakenly wore the hat of some sort of Russian official. If that famed story within a story within a story makes you lose your head, we’ve finally come up with a sure way to put the correct hat on Sholem Shakhne, without fail. Pin the hat on Sholem Shakhne is a rollicking party game for people of all ages who are anxious about modernity and their place in it, or who want to take part in an ongoing search for socio-psychological verities about the Jewish condition. Play it today, or at least you should definitely play it in time for Peysekh.

Printable pdf version here.

MLA STYLE
Bach, Alona. “Pin the Hat on Sholem Shachne.” In geveb, March 2024: https://ingeveb.org/blog/pin-the-hat-on-sholem-shachne.
CHICAGO STYLE
Bach, Alona. “Pin the Hat on Sholem Shachne.” In geveb (March 2024): Accessed Mar 15, 2025.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alona Bach

Alona Bach is a PhD student in MIT's Program in HASTS (History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society), where she studies the interwar intersections of electric light and Yiddish.