In his memoir of his Warsaw childhood, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer describes his enthusiasm for a series of Yiddish-language mystery novels featuring Max Spitzkopf, a Sherlock Holmes-like detective. David Mazower, Elissa Sperling, and Michael Yashinsky describe these bestselling potboilers and their colorful author:
For all their crude plots and cardboard characters, it’s easy to see why these stories appealed. They are packed with incident, quickfire dialogue, and cliff-hanging chapter endings. As the breathless advertising copy on the back cover [of one] tells us: “Time and again, [Spitzkopf] has been in the greatest danger, but each time his razor-sharp mind has saved him!” The same blurb highlights another obvious selling-point: “MAX SPITZKOPF IS A JEW—and he has always taken every opportunity to stand up FOR JEWS. Whenever a Jew has faced some injustice and turned to Spitzkopf for help, he was never disappointed. And this makes Spitzkopf particularly interesting for the Jewish reading public.” (Emphasis in the original.)
These are not just detective stories but tales of Jewish ingenuity featuring an armed Jewish superhero. Spitzkopf rights the wrongs of a world rife with anti-Semitism using his extraordinary powers of deduction (though his revolver sometimes also comes in handy).
Fifteen Spitzkopf stories appeared in all. They were published anonymously, but it seems their authorship was an open secret from the beginning. Spitzkopf was the creation of Jonas Kreppel, a gifted and prolific writer who is only now beginning to receive proper scholarly attention.
Kreppel was born into a middle-class ḥasidic family in Drohobycz, Galicia, [now in Ukraine], in 1874. A brilliantly gifted talmudic prodigy, he was destined for the rabbinate but found his calling as a journalist, editor, civil servant, and public intellectual writing in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Polish. . . . Kreppel attended the Czernowitz Jewish language conference in 1908, was active in Zionist politics on behalf of the Orthodox Agudath Israel movement, and edited or published a series of Galician Jewish newspapers. . . . Kreppel also had a role as adviser to the Austrian foreign ministry, and at one point almost became Austrian consul in Palestine.
Kreppel was murdered at Buchenwald in 1940. A translated excerpt of one of the Spitzkopf stories can be found at the link below.
Read more on Pakn Treger: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/max-spitzkopf-viennese-sherlock-holmes