A shtetl girl has vanished! And only one man can save her. Armed with nothing but his brains and a loaded revolver, Max Spitzkopf steps in to save the day and rescue a floundering family. Our story begins in the Frisch home, where “a monstrous tension reigns.” The father, Reb Menashe Frisch, “is pacing madly, rubbing his hands together till one nearly breaks the other”:
His wife Leah lies about and falls into fainting spells, their tiny children are crying—no, wailing. And the servants are running from one room to the next in the greatest terror.
Because a terrible thing has happened. Reb Menashe’s eldest daughter, Chanah, a girl of seventeen, has disappeared in the middle of the night under mysterious circumstances.
Cast into a whirlwind of fear and worry, early twentieth-century readers of Yiddish detective novels enjoyed the pulpy thrill of a genre that had taken the world by storm. Their homegrown hero wasn’t Sherlock Holmes but Max Spitzkopf, a brilliant, multilingual Jewish detective who tore across Europe, cracking cases involving the wealthy Jewish elite of Vienna and salt of the earth Jews in Galician shtetls.
The modern detective novel can be traced to Edgar Allen Poe’s 1842 story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” followed by the more famous “Purloined Letter” two years later. Inspired by Poe’s work, a struggling ophthalmologist named Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in the 1880s, writing dozens of stories that became the paradigm for the classic detective tale. The stories reached Central and Eastern Europe in translation during the 1890s. Local writers began to adapt and imitate the genre. Cossacks and bandits began to appear in Russian and Polish variants, endearing the stories to local readers.
But for a long time, if Jews of these regions wanted to read such novels, they had to do so in languages other than their own. One early attempt to address this was a Hebrew edition of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. A classic of the crime genre, set in a seedy underworld filled with butchers, prostitutes, and dark alleyways, the 1858 translation was published by Vilna’s Romm Press—an esteemed institution better known for producing the standard edition of the Talmud. Though the Hebrew version of Sue’s mystery novel saw at least three printings, it remained inaccessible to most Jewish readers, whose vernacular was Yiddish.
Yiddish readers got access to the world of detective novels in the New York Forverts in 1906, and in 1907 the Sherlock Holmes stories were published in booklets in Lemberg, Cracow, and Warsaw. According to Nathan Cohen’s fascinating 2012 article on the history of Yiddish detective stories, “Sherlock Holmes in the Pale of Settlement,” printers couldn’t keep up with the demand.
It wasn’t until 1909 that a Jewish detective appeared at the scene of a crime. The brainchild of a jack-of-all-trades publicist named Yoyne Krepl (Jonas Kreppel, in German), the Max Spitzkopf detective series was an immediate hit. Kreppel, a fascinating character who wrote dozens of books, worked as a spokesman for both the Austrian government and as a publicist for the Orthodox political party, Agudath Israel. Born on Christmas 1874 to a Hasidic family in Drohobyc, he started out as a typesetter and printer and also had a hand in publishing Der yid, the first Yiddish newspaper in Cracow, as well as that city’s first Hasidic newspaper, Der emeser yid (The Real Jew). In addition to publishing his own booklets, magazines, and newspapers, he worked as a Zionist activist and was a delegate at the famed 1908 Tshernovitz Yiddish Conference.
Kreppel was eclectic to say the least. Among his writings were Hasidic tales; tkhines (women’s prayers); and pop historical accounts of Maimonides, the Spanish Inquisition, and the discovery of America. But Kreppel had a real penchant for lurid crime stories. This agitated the Yiddish literati, who found his stories vulgar. A sensationalistic weekly magazine he published in Cracow, the Yidishe ilustrirte tsaytung, was full of sex and violence. The Satmar Rebbe himself criticized the immorality of Kreppel’s detective fiction, and one can find complaints about the author’s work on more aesthetic grounds as far away as New York. In a 1910 article in Dos yidishe vokhnblat on Yiddish literature in Galicia, the writer Gershom Bader mocked Kreppel as the author of “dumb detective stories,” which is not entirely unfair.
And yet, Isaac Bashevis Singer recalled being enthralled by the “heavenly music” of the stories as a boy, and in 1955, the Yiddish poet Mendl Naygreshel lauded Kreppel as a major figure in the development of Yiddish literature in Galicia. He also called him “one of the weirdest journalists to ever live in Galicia” and “a 100% opportunist.” He noted that Kreppel was a Zionist agitator who also had no compunction about writing fiery anti-Zionist copy in the service of an assimilationist political party that had hired him. But Kreppel also “enchanted all of Western Galicia” with his wide variety of publications, which were “hugely successful, especially the stories of Max Spitzkopf, which could be found in every Jewish home.”
The Spitzkopf stories were so popular that Yiddish newspaper editors sometimes stole them, publishing them under fake bylines—interestingly, Kreppel never put his own name on the stories, but his authorship was, as Mikhl Yashinsky writes in the introduction to his excellent new translation of these stories, “an open secret.” Just months after the first Spitzkopf booklet appeared in Galicia in 1909, the socialist-Zionist New York Yiddish daily, Di varhayt, printed it as their own, crediting it to “Max Blaystein,” a nonexistent author. A front-page advertisement announced the imminent publication of a novel called “The Secrets of a Galician Detective” and claimed it was “far better, more suspenseful, much more interesting, and even more exciting than any novel you’ve ever read up until now.”
The stories of Spitzkopf’s detection and derring-do are among the thousands of stories that once thrilled the Yiddish reading public that have also been sitting moribund for at least the past century. Yashinsky, a Yiddishist and an actor whose credits include Nokhem the beggar in the Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof, has done an admirable job of translating these tales. Spitzkopf and his trusty Watson-like assistant, Fuchs, lead the reader from city to shtetl, sussing out crooks, deciphering clues, and solving all manner of crimes, from the kidnapping of a Hasidic rabbi’s daughter to grotesque murders, and all within a deeply Jewish context. There are desperate midnight rides, Purim celebrations, Pesach preparations, and a surprising number of evil priests, not to speak of dynamite sticks and distressed damsels. Has there ever been a hard-boiled detective novel that intimately described preparations for Shabes-hagodl, the Sabbath before Passover?
Despite the period triteness of these tales, one quickly becomes enamored of the brilliant Spitzkopf and bumbling Fuchs as they travel around solving crimes for Jews in need. That, perhaps, is one of the more historically salient aspects of the book—that early twentieth-century Yiddish-speaking Jews were given a hero they didn’t have in real life. Kreppel himself died in Buchenwald in 1940 after two years of forced labor in a limestone quarry.
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