"as the Jews say, 'vumnaya'" (dialect mockery of умная)

A period antisemitic dialect joke: Chekhov calls a review "umnaya" (clever), then adds "or, as the Jews say, 'vumnaya'" -- mimicking a stereotyped Yiddish-inflected mispronunciation of the Russian word for "clever" (adding an intrusive initial "v"). Distinct from the related self-deprecating idiom "as the learned Yids say", which borrows a mock-authoritative phrase-pattern without mimicking pronunciation: here the joke's mechanism is specifically dialect mockery, ridiculing how Jewish speakers were stereotyped to mispronounce Russian, layered onto the same "as the Jews say" framing. It is not aimed at any person or group named in the letter. Reflects the casual, unexamined antisemitism common in the vernacular of educated Russians in the 1880s, including Chekhov's own private correspondence at this period. Per this corpus's editorial policy of presenting historical material factually rather than suppressing or euphemizing documented usage, the joke is preserved in translation (rendered "clefer" to carry the mispronunciation gag into English) and flagged here for context, not endorsed.