This week, I have been filming an episode of a Catholic detective series in the Cotswolds, so there’s less chance of me finding a Jewish topic to write about than if I’d been filming a Mongolian detective show in Ulan Bator. Mind you, Ross Kemp once told me he filmed a documentary about a large pro-Nazi gathering in Ulan Bator, so I may have to rethink my analogy.
In the words of GK Chesterton, “Only cops and criminals are really alive.” Chesterton was an old-fashioned antisemite who believed Jews were aliens who, if they remained here, should be made to dress in Arab clothing.
He was anti-Imperialist and pro-Zionist, but only because it meant the removal of all Jews from his immediate vicinity.
Actually there was, and is, a very old Jewish community in Cheltenham with a lovely Regency shul and a newish Jewish Reform congregation, but let’s just say you probably won’t find a mohel in Moreton-in-Marsh. There was, however, a large gathering of Romany men and boys one early evening, with at least 50 small gypsy cob horses in Stow-on-the-Wold, which was lively and picturesque and, in one concentrated munching, they left behind several beautifully manicured lawns.
I looked into the world of Jewish detectives, hoping for a Shylock Hurwitz and Doctor Weitzman and came up with a surprising number in fiction, led by the Rabbi Small novels by Harry Kemelman, the first of which was Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, and Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. In Rabbi Small’s world the rabbi fulfils his historic role as one who sits in talmudic judgment on the cases that were brought to him, which puts him in the perfect position to help with a murder case.
In Chabon’s brilliant alternative scenario, six million Jews escaped the Holocaust and were resettled in Alaska to set up their own community, “The Frozen Chosen”.
Perhaps my most interesting discovery was the Yiddish detective Max Spitzkopf, the Viennese Sherlock Holmes, and his sidekick Fuchs, in the Mayse-bukh Yiddish storybooks sold from street kiosks and commonplace in Warsaw.
From the 1870s these stories, abhorred by critics as lowbrow trash, bewitched the immigrant population, sold in massive amounts and inspired the young Isaac Bashevis Singer.
“The detective stories seemed like masterpieces to me,” he wrote in his memoirs. “A sentence from one of them remains in my memory. Spitzkopf, gun in his hands, is surprising a robber with the words, ‘Hands up, you rogue. We’ve got you covered.’ For years these words ran like music through my mind.”
“The detective stories are not just scenes of crime but tales of Jewish ingenuity featuring an armed Jewish superhero,” writes David Mazower. “Spitzkopf rights the wrongs of a world rife with antisemitism, using his extraordinary powers of deduction.”
The 15 novels were the moonlighting income of the brilliant intellectual journalist Jonas Kreppel. They were published anonymously, although his identity was known to all his circle. He was from a Chasidic family in Drohobycz, Galicia, a prodigy and a talmudic scholar who became a journalist, editor and civil servant.
He married and settled in Vienna in 1914, where he edited a German-Jewish weekly and involved himself in Austrian politics, but he returned to pulp fiction between 1924-1930 and published more than 100 more books of crime fiction, Chasidic stories, First World War and historical tales.
Once the Nazis took over, Kreppel, as a prominent Jewish figure, was rounded up, sent first to Dachau and then murdered in 1940 in Buchenwald. We can only conjecture, as usual, what masterpieces of imagination he would have added to the canon of Jewish literature.
Klaus Kreppel (who was unrelated), a German historian, became fascinated by Jonas and in 1917 wrote a biography, Faithful and Patriotic, of this underrated Jewish author, as a result of which Jonas Kreppel’s work is now being re-examined.
Meanwhile, back in the Cotswold crime scenario, where I’m in a make-up truck housed in the car park of a run-down former mansion, my brain filled with phrases such as “Halt miscreant! I am the detective Max Spitzkopf and I have caught you red-handed”, the conversation was less…er… novel.
The thespian talk is of designer sneakers, eye-lash enhancer and residual payments. Yesterday it was hair products, root cover and nutrition. My roots are grey, as is my whole head, my eyelashes are still preventing debris from getting in my eyes, I’m still drinking cow’s milk and consuming caffeine, so I had little to add.
Still, it doesn’t take long to create a family and later that evening, shorn of blood-red lipstick and false hair, we scoff haddock and chips and start spilling gossip and picking at each other’s arancini and rocket salad. In short, we bond and instantly the work gets better.
I am picked up at 6.40am and dropped back at 8pm. I learn my lines at midnight after a raucous evening of Merlot and merriment. I am very happy. We are a troupe of actors and this is what we do.
At 3pm on Friday I return to NW3 and we have a traditional Friday night with chicken soup, three of his kinder and one of mine. The soup has to be rationed because on Sunday morning another set of auction winners will arrive at the house to learn from the soap-and-soup star the sacred art of simmering a boiling fowl. For this and for the charity Shooting Star Children’s Hospices they paid several thousand pounds, so attention must be paid and bagels and Bellinis laid out.
In the afternoon Lord Glasman puts in an unscheduled appearance and eats the rest of the chicken soup. He tells me he feels the Jewish community is too fearful, too obsessed by antisemitism.
He wants us as we were, laughing and disrupting and creating art and havoc. “Like Jonas Kreppel did, huh?” I say. “Jews have paranoia, confirmed by history – so, like boy scouts, we have to be prepared!”
Jewish Chronicle readers, over to you for an opinion on what paranoia setting you are on...
