From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

In March 1977, Yedies included this short article about books in the YIVO Library by one very prolific author, Jonah Kreppel, reportedly the writer of 100 novels, as well as other works. His output included detective novels, no known examples of which were extant at the time the article was published.

In My Father’s Court, Isaac Bashevis Singer recalls the great impression the Maks Shpitskop detective novels made on him:

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 naïve words ran like music through my mind.

(Singer, Isaac Bashevis, In My Father’s Court, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967, p. 253)

A search of Worldcat brings up Maḳs Shpitsḳopf der ḳenig fun di deṭeḳṭiṿs : der Ṿiener Sherloḳ Holmes (Maks Shpitskopf, King of Detectives: The Viennese Sherlock Holmes) at both the National Library of Israel and Yale University, undated and unattributed to Kreppel in the catalog records. And there are a handful of titles at the National Library of Poland, Harvard, and Stanford that might be other surviving examples of  Kreppel's detective novels.

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