Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes

Jonas (Yoyne) Kreppel was born into a Hasidic family in Drohobych, Galicia, in 1874, the fourth of seven children. After apprenticing as a printer, he found his calling as a journalist, civil servant, and author. Kreppel attended the Czernowitz conference in 1908 that adjudicated on the future of Yiddish, was active in the Orthodox political movement Agudas Yisroel, and edited several Jewish periodicals in Galicia. After marrying the daughter of prominent Krakow printer Josef Fischer, he began anonymously writing for his father-in-law's press the fifteen stories of fictional supersleuth Max Spitzkopf, whose exploits would thrill vast swaths of Yiddish readers, including the young Isaac Bashevis Singer. Settling in Vienna in 1914, Kreppel's chief activity for the next three decades consisted of editing a German-Jewish weekly, penning historical and political tomes in German as well as another series of popular fiction pamphlets in Yiddish, and serving as a press officer for the Austrian diplomatic service. As a prominent Austrian-Jewish intellectual and outspoken critic of Nazism, Kreppel became a target shortly after Austria united with Hitler's Germany in 1938. He was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, where he was murdered on July 21, 1940.