Did you hear the one about the Russian Jew from Minnesota who walked into a Chicago bar to sell the owner Swedish booze? Sure, it sounds like the set-up of a bad joke, but it's a true story and one entertainingly told by journalist Josh Noel in Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit . George Brode was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1909, the fourth of five children. His parents had fled Tsar Nicholas's crumbling empire and stayed briefly in England and Canada. The Brodes (then