It would have been better the other way around

“Pardner, did you hear that there is chorela [cholera] among the people of Újpest? Even real chorela!”
“Surely it would be better if their money was real and their chorela fake.”
(Újpest, or New Pest, was a recently-incorporated town on the north side of Budapest proper, and a higher proportion of its residents were Jewish, though not from the bourgeois elite.)
(Kakas Márton, Budapest, 1911)