KLEIN, A(braham) M(oses)

Nationality: Canadian (originally Russian: immigrated to Canada, 1910). Born: Ratno, Ukraine, 14 February 1909. Education: Studied classics and political science at McGill University, Montreal (cofounder, The McGilliad ), 1926-30, B.A. 1930 (associated with the "Montreal Group" of poets and writers); University of Montreal, law degree 1933. Family: Married Bessie Kozlov in 1935; two sons and one daughter. Career: Lawyer, Montreal, 1933-56, and Rouyn, Quebec, 1937-38. Contributor and editor, Judaean (Canadian Young Judea), and educational director, Canadian Young Judea, while a student; president, Canadian Young Judea, ca. 1934. Associate director, Zionist Organization of Canada and editor, The Canadian Zionist, 1936; cofounder and partner of a law firm; member of public relations staff, Samuel Bronfman, Montreal, 1939-55; associated with the Preview group of Montreal poets, 1940s; lecturer in poetry, McGill University, 1945-48; active in Canadian socialist party politics, 1945, 1949. Contributor and editor, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, late 1920s to 1955. Awards: Edward Bland fellowship, 1947; Governor General's medal for poetry, 1949, for The Rocking Chair and Other Poems; Quebec literary prize and Kovner memorial award, both in 1952; Royal Society of Canada Lorne Pierce gold medal, 1957. Died: 20 August 1972.

Publications

Poetry

Hath Not a Jew. 1940.

The Hitleriad. 1944.

Poems: The Psalter of Avram Haktani. 1944; as Poems, 1944.

Seven Poems. 1947.

The Rocking Chair and Other Poems. 1948.

Collected Poems, edited by Miriam Waddington. 1974.

A.M. Klein: Complete Poems, edited by Zailig Pollock:

Vol. 1: Original Poems, 1926-1934. 1990.

Vol. 2: Original Poems, 1937-1955 and Poetry Translations. 1990.

Doctor Dwarf and Other Poems for Children, edited by Mary Alice Downie and Barbara Robertson. 1990.

Selected Poems, edited by Usher Caplan, Seymour Mayne, and Zailig Pollock. 1997.

A Rich Garland: Poems for A.M. Klein (selections), edited by Seymour Mayne and B. Glen Rotchin. 1999.

Novel

The Second Scroll. 1951.

Short Stories

A.M. Klein: Short Stories, edited by M. W. Steinberg. 1983.

Other

A Shout in the Street: An Analysis of the Second Chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. 1952.

Beyond Sambation: Selected Essays and Editorials, 1928-1955, edited by M. W. Steinberg and Usher Caplan. 1983.

A.M. Klein: Literary Essays and Reviews, edited by M. W. Steinberg and Usher Caplan. 1987.

Notebooks: Selections from the A.M. Klein Papers, edited by Zailig Pollock and Usher Caplan. 1994.

Translator, Of Jewish Music, Ancient and Modern by Israel Rabinovich. 1952.

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Bibliography:

A.M. Klein: An Annotated Bibliography by Zailig Pollock, Usher Caplan, and Linda Rozmovits, 1993.

Critical Studies:

A.M. Klein, edited by Tom Marshall, 1970; A.M. Klein, 1970, and Folklore in the Poetry of A.M. Klein, 1981, both by Miriam Waddington; In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and Ethics in the Writings of A.M. Klein by Gretl K. Fischer, 1975; The A.M. Klein Symposium, edited by Seymour Mayne, 1975; "A.M. Klein: Portrait of the Poet As Jew" by Esther Safer Fisher, in Canadian Literature, 79, 1978, pp. 121-27; Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A.M. Klein by Usher Caplan, 1982; Tapestry for Designs: Judaic Allusions in The Second Scroll and The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein by Solomon J. Spiro, 1984; A.M. Klein issue of Journal of Canadian Studies, 19(2), Summer 1984; "A.M. Klein and Mordecai Richler: Canadian Responses to the Holocaust," in Journal of Canadian Studies, 24, Summer 1989, pp. 65-77, and A.M. Klein, the Father of Canadian Jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion, 1990, both by Rachel Feldhay Brenner; A.M. Klein and His Works by Noreen Golfman, 1990; A.M. Klein: The Story of a Poet by Zailig Pollock, 1994; Aught from Naught: A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll by Roger Hyman, 1999; "Pan-Semitism in A.M. Klein's 'The Three Judgements"' by Feisal G. Mohamed, in Essays on Canadian Writing, 72, Winter 2000, pp. 93-108.

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Primarily known as one of Canada's most gifted poets, Montreal author A.M. Klein was also a brilliantly imaginative and versatile man of letters. Forced by illness to end his career in 1955, Klein had by then accumulated a remarkably extensive legacy, consisting of novels, short stories, plays, critical essays, book reviews, and translations, in addition to his four published volumes of finely crafted poetry.

Klein's achievements as a writer were realized despite the demanding public life he led, simultaneously with his personal writing career, in the service of his Montreal community. For 20 years he was an active partner in the law firm he helped found, and for 16 of those years he also served as editor of the weekly Canadian Jewish Chronicle. For many years he was speechwriter and public relations consultant to the head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and he himself often represented the Congress, giving speeches across Canada and the United States. For three happy years, after World War II, Klein enjoyed a visiting appointment as professor of poetry in the English Department of his alma mater, McGill University. While he found it relaxing, he was typically conscientious in the preparation of his carefully researched lectures.

The frantic pace and pressure of his double life, as public servant and private writer, exacted a fearful toll on Klein's health and contributed to the disabling breakdown that forced him, reluctantly, to give up permanently all of his activities, both public and private, in 1955 and to live thereafter in quiet retirement until his death in 1972. Nevertheless, Klein always maintained that he had no choice but to live as he did. Deeply ingrained in him was the dual obligation to serve his community actively, in whatever ways he could, and to share with others the advantages his education had given him. This latter obligation inspired him to become a writer, using his own fascination with language as the ideal means of reaching the widest possible audience with the fruits of his learning.

Klein's passionate interest in language, in his youth, was powerfully stimulated by what he viewed as his good fortune: to be growing up in the language-rich city of Montreal. When he entered McGill University in 1927, he was already fluent in four languages—Yiddish, Hebrew, English and French—and had done advanced work in Latin and Greek. The high standard of elegant expression in English, as taught in Montreal's public schools, held a special appeal for him, and he found, in the English Bible and in Shakespeare, admirable models of fine writing, which he resolved to emulate. Thus the heady ambition to become a writer was already burning within him as a McGill undergraduate, and during those years he devoted more and more of his time to writing, succeeding in getting a few of his own poems published in small magazines and in founding, with a friend, a student literary magazine.

For purely economic reasons Klein went directly from McGill to law school, but in his own mind he was committed to what he considered to be his true calling: becoming a writer. Throughout the 1930s, despite the demands of his public life, Klein made time almost every day to experiment with different modes and forms of literary expression and to explore the creative potential in a variety of themes and topics. He became a man obsessed with the power of language and of the written word. Increasingly, also, he found the focus of his writing shifting from aesthetic considerations to the desire to highlight Jewish themes, using the linguistic elegance of English to help preserve and celebrate traditional Jewish values. Noting the consequences of Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, he feared that the cultural traditions of his people, which gave so much meaning to his life, were again in danger of extinction, as had so often occurred in Jewish history. His new obsession became the defense and preservation of those values, through the powers of literary art. His collection of poems on Jewish themes, Hath Not A Jew (1940), and his angry polemical poem, The Hitleriad (1944), were the direct products of this new obsession.

Once the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps began to filter out, near the end of World War II, Klein's instinctive response was to confront directly, in his poems of that period, the painful implications of the Holocaust. In his last publication, a powerfully moving poetic novel called The Second Scroll (1951), Klein became the first Canadian author to describe, in detail, the most inhuman abuses of the camps, yet he also managed to close on a note of triumph by depicting the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 as the latest miracle of Jewish survival and as a joyous vindication of Zionism's redemptive power.

—Murray Sachs

See the essays on Collected Poems and The Second Scroll.