Anekdot query

[Ben Rifkin]

Dear SEELANGers:

Can someone help remind me of the Russian anekdot about heaven and hell,
something along the lines of heaven is the place where the cook is French,
the police officer is English, the engineer is German, the lover is Italian,
and the philosopher is Russian, while hell is the place where the cook is
English, the philosopher is Italian, the police officer is German ...
(perhaps here we could add that the American is the

I know this anekdot is not from War & Peace, in which Tolstoy writes about
the arrogance of different peoples and concludes that the arrogance of the
German is the worst because he knows unquestioningly that he is right.

I want to present some context for discussing stereotypes in class. I¹ll be
using the famous elephant book contest (competition to come up with a book
about elephants, joke from the 1980s).

Thanks for your help.

Ben Rifkin



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