“Yiddish Sherlock Holmes” in English
The Yiddish literature has its own famous detective: Max Spitzkopf, the “Yiddish Sherlock Holmes”. For the first time his adventures, written by Jonas Kreppel (1874-1940), were published in English, translated by Mikhl Yashinsky, mainly known as an actor and theater researcher who recently has also published another important book, the English translation of the memoirs of the pioneering Yiddish actress Ester-Rokhl Kaminska.
According to Jonas Kreppel’s imagination, Max Spitzkopf lived in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire. The series of books about his adventures were originally published in Austro-Hungary and gained great popularity among local Jews, especially in Galicia. In 1938, after the Nazi occupation of Austria, Kreppel was sent the the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died in 1940.
Interestingly, some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s world-famous stories about Sherlock Holmes have also been translated into Yiddish by David Hermalin in 1928. Quite a few Yiddish readers were familiar with both imagined detectives, the London-based Sherlock Holmes and the Vienna-based Jewish Max Spitzkopf.