Here is, for exam­ple, an impor­tant piece of evi­dence I found dur­ing my inves­ti­ga­tion: a fierce arti­cle writ­ten on detec­tive fic­tion in a Hebrew news­pa­per in Pales­tine in the 1930’s, when the first trans­la­tions of detec­tive fic­tion to Hebrew were made (main­ly to Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries) and the first orig­i­nal detec­tive sto­ries in Hebrew were written:

The crit­ic’s empha­sis on the word ​“com­merce” here is not inno­cent. I think it refers to the stereo­types of ​“Old” and ​“New” Jew – the first, the sup­pos­ed­ly uproot­ed dias­poric Jew, being con­cerned with mon­ey mak­ing, whilst the sec­ond, the new Pales­tin­ian Jew, the Hebrew, is con­cerned with cur­ing the nation, phys­i­cal­ly as well as spir­i­tu­al­ly. By that time, in the ear­ly 1920’s, pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture in gen­er­al and detec­tive fic­tion in par­tic­u­lar were already wide-spread in Yid­dish. In this sense, the trans­la­tions of detec­tive sto­ries into Hebrew in Pales­tine were per­ceived as a threat to the puri­ty of the Zion­ist Cul­tur­al Revolution.

It’s inter­est­ing to see that the defend­ers of detec­tive fic­tion in this debate, whilst reject­ing the argu­ments against the genre, used the same nation­al ter­mi­nol­o­gy in order to pro­mote it. Their argu­men­ta­tion relied on the con­tri­bu­tion of detec­tive fic­tion to the nation­al project. Their main argu­ment for intro­duc­ing detec­tive fic­tion into Hebrew lit­er­a­ture referred to the gen­re’s pos­si­ble con­tri­bu­tion to the revival of mod­ern Hebrew lan­guage. They noticed the pop­u­lar­i­ty of detec­tive fic­tion among Jew­ish read­ers in Yid­dish and argued that in order to per­suade Jew­ish youth to learn Hebrew, it was cru­cial to devel­op Hebrew detec­tive fic­tion that would attract readers. 

These argu­ments have marked the con­di­tion of detec­tive fic­tion writ­ten or trans­lat­ed into Hebrew from that moment on, and maybe until this very day. This is the rea­son for the rel­a­tive­ly few trans­la­tions of for­eign crime fic­tion, at least until recent years, and why I found myself, at the age of 11 or 12, in front of emp­ty library shelves. 

This is also the answer to the ques­tion I asked myself: How did I come to read The Hound of the Baskervilles at the age of 8 or 9? Detec­tive fic­tion, even when it was trans­lat­ed, was clas­si­fied as chil­dren’s fic­tion. Thus, until recent­ly, Arthur Conan Doyle’s nov­els and short sto­ries were pub­lished in Hebrew edi­tions aimed at chil­dren – and most of the orig­i­nal detec­tive fic­tion in Hebrew from the 1930’s until the late 1980’s was writ­ten for chil­dren or was con­sid­ered chil­dren’s literature. 

In fact, it was only in the late 1980’s that detec­tive fic­tion real­ly appeared in Hebrew adult fic­tion, name­ly in the form of two ser­i­al detec­tive-nov­els writ­ten by two female authors, Batya Gur and Shu­lamit Lapid. Gur’s A Sat­ur­day Morn­ing Mur­der, intro­duc­ing police inspec­tor Michael Ohay­on, was first pub­lished in 1988, and Lapid’s Local Paper, intro­duc­ing ama­teur sleuth Lizi Badi­hi, was first pub­lished in 1989. Both gained com­mer­cial suc­cess and some crit­i­cal appre­ci­a­tion and both revealed the sec­ond prob­lem of writ­ing a detec­tive nov­el in Israel – that is, the prob­lem of the Mizrahi (or Sephara­di) protagonist.