Meet the Holmes (and Watson) of pre-war East European Jewry

In 1908, Max Spitzkopf, whose surname translates as pointy-head, or clever, started appearing in comic strips in Yiddish magazines in Krakow. Dubbed the Yiddish Sherlock Holmes, King of Detectives, the milieu he inhabited is not Victorian London and rural England but Vienna and the shtetls of Jewish Galicia. While Conan Doyle’s hero pits himself against the evil genius of Professor Moriarty, Spitzkopf’s principal enemies are pogromists fuelled by blood libels and predatory missionaries converting Jewish youths for cash.

Spitzkopf and his assistant Fuchs, much like the comic-strip versions of Batman and Robin, to whom they are more readily comparable than Holmes and Watson, survive frequent massive blows to the head and near-death escapades, displaying an appealing sense of Jewish invincibility which, only too soon, was to prove an illusion.

Spitzkopf was the creation of Jonas (Yoyne) Kreppel. Kreppel was born on Christmas Day 1874 in Drohobych (Drohobycz as it was then spelt), in Austrian Galicia, now Ukraine, into a Chasidic family and considered a brilliant Talmudic scholar. Destined for the rabbinate, he instead became a journalist and served as a delegate to the 1908 conference for the Yiddish language in Czernowitz before becoming press officer to the Austrian foreign ministry in Vienna. Kreppel’s most substantial work was a colossal German-language volume, Jews and Judaism of Today, published in 1925. But it was his creation Max Spitzkopf that gained him anonymous, widespread popularity. Kreppel chose to write the stories in Yiddish, the language of the majority of pre-war Eastern European Jewry. This was not the high-brow art of Bruno Schulz or Yiddish literary figures such as Isaac Bashevis Singer but what was known as “shund” – low-brow trash – much of it written in the crude language of cartoon strips, featuring absurd coincidence, creaking plots, and pantomime villains. Nonetheless, Singer, the sole Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer, in his autobiography, In My Father’s Court, wrote: “The detective stories seemed like masterpieces to me. A sentence from one of them remains in my memory, a caption under a drawing showing Max Spitzkopf and his assistant, Fuchs, guns in hand, surprising a robber. Spitzkopf is crying out, ‘Hands up, you rogue. We’ve got you covered.’ For years, these naive words ran like music through my mind.” The Spitzkopf stories are not high art, but, perhaps inspired by their raw energy, the young Singer saw Yiddish’s potential for development in his own work.

Mikhl Yashinsky’s English translations, in this new collection of Kreppel’s tales, are vivid and evocative, but in two instances where I was able to see the Yiddish, he has strayed some distance from Kreppel’s original. A sozzled warden’s, “What do you want of the governor? Just have patience. Firstly, you’ll submit a report of what you were looking for at night in Jewish houses,” becomes, “Wha’ to the gubbernor hisself? You’be gotta be patient. Firss why dontcha tell me what’sit you were looking for in the Jewzish streets last night.” Yiddish often carries the raw flavour of the streets on which it was spoken, but in his attempts to capture it here, Yashinsky has strayed some way from the original.