In 2003, when Margaret Avison was presented with the prize for the year’s best collection of Canadian poetry at the Griffin Awards Dinner, her comment to the audience was: “This is ridiculous.” She then went on to explain that the experience of standing up in front of a rapturous crowd to receive a prize for her poetry was about as remote as she could imagine from her own sense of what poetry is. Anyone who knows Avison’s poetry – deeply private, challenging, even esoteric in language and vision – will immediately understand what she meant. There is no poet for whom the...

It is the literary scholar, the biographer, and the archivist who have interested themselves in the unfinished and unpublished works left behind after an author’s death. Whether these are youthful efforts that proved embarrassing, fragments that did not receive full attention, or simple failures, the role such artefacts should play in our understanding of a writer’s work and life is ambiguous and difficult to define. Certain writing lives are consumed with unpublished and unfinished works. A cursory reading of Franz Kafka’s biography marks him as, in ways both sad and darkly funny, the prime model for this – with major works...

The lure of authenticity is particularly strong in the case of prominent people, whether poets or politicians. We are intrigued by the possibility that in their letters we can hear the personal intonation often masked in the public voice, that we can piece together the “narrative” of their lives from the evidence of preserved moments in time. And, as Malcolm goes on to speculate, part of the attraction is “the feeling of transgression that comes from reading letters not meant for one’s eyes” — in spite of the inseparable “discomfort and unease”(110).This is certainly my experience as a reader of the...

In A. M. Klein’s oeuvre, in his poetry, his prose, and even in his journalism and occasional writings, constant attention is given to voice – that is, to language as a physical phenomenon, to language as it is performed by one person as it passes through the mouth, thus acquiring a colour, a rhythm, a resonance unmistakable with any other, and is transformed in the process into a powerful mark of individuality. Voiceprint is not less defined than fingerprints. For Klein, language is not merely a code as a means of communication; rather, it is the individual speech of a singular...

As the torch of mainstream North American Jewish literature passed from Yiddish to English around him, A.M. Klein remained firmly planted in both languages. His literary career exemplifies the struggle for Jewish continuity in Canada’s Eastern European immigrant community during the first half of the twentieth century. While the mass migration of roughly 140,000 Yiddish-speakers in the opening decades of the century was funnelled into English society through education in its schools, the pre-twentieth-century norm of Jewish anglicization was no longer automatic.¹ The upheaval of this immigration – with its strong commitments to Eastern European Jewish tradition – altered the historic connections...

Usher Caplan remarked about A.M. Klein that “his goal, in a sense, was to affect a modern ‘translation’ of Judaism into English.”¹ This reflects a reasonable consensus among students of A.M. Klein’s oeuvre that it is impossible to understand Klein without taking his Jewishness into serious consideration.² It is also fairly universally accepted that, in particular, the poetry of A.M. Klein was affected in an important way by his Jewish heritage. This is certainly the opinion of one of his earliest serious readers, Ludwig Lewisohn. Writing in the 1930s, Lewisohn commented that Klein’s was authentic Jewish poetry in the English...

Many readers know that A.M. Klein was at home in the Yiddish language and maintained close ties with the Yiddish intelligentsia of Montreal throughout his life. Given the date of immigration of his parents to Canada, at the height of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews, and the fact that Yiddish was the language of his home, it is no exaggeration to state that Yiddish was the poet’s mame loshen, or mother tongue. Born in Ratno, Ukraine, in 1909, Klein arrived in Canada in 1910, at a time when the Montreal Yiddish community had established itself near the port...

That Mount Royal was important to A.M. Klein is clear from the number of times it figures in his writings, both published and unpublished. Among English-language poets of mid-century Montreal, Klein is the only one to have devoted three poems specifically to the mountain. The poems “Winter Night, Mount Royal,” “Lookout: Mount Royal,” and “The Mountain,” published in The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, give us a sense not only of what the mountain meant to Klein but also of how it was lived by Montrealers residing in the neighbourhoods adjacent to it. Klein’s poems of Mount Royal, like other...

A.M. Klein’s best-known work, his 1951 novel The Second Scroll, is a saga that takes the narrator from Montreal to Jerusalem through a series of stopovers, including Casablanca and Rome. Though the novel is based on Klein’s own voyage to Israel in 1949, it adopts an itinerary that is slightly different from the one Klein himself took. Klein flew directly to Lydda in the new state of Israel. It was only on the return flight that he made stopovers in Paris and Rome, as one was inclined to do in the days when air travel was still a luxury and...

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, A.M. Klein travelled frequently to the Canadian west on behalf of the Canadian Jewish Congress and the United Jewish Relief Agency. In announcing his 1949 speaking tour to Moose Jaw, Weyburn, Estevan, Dauphin, Melville, and Humboldt¹ – towns and small cities on the Canadian Prairie where today there are few, if any, Jews – the Jewish Post of Winnipeg refers to him as “a famous Canadian orator” and proclaims, “it is well known that Mr. Klein is one of the outstanding Canadian poets, but it is less well known that he is one of the...

If A.M. Klein opened a way for Montreal’s Jewish writers to enter the English mainstream, we might speak of several literary sons: Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Mordecai Richler. From Layton – who, of the three, knew Klein best – one gets a fairly objective poetic assessment in “Requiem for A.M. Klein”:

Your scholar’s mind neat as your hair

... your psychological obtuseness

And the sentimentality each clever Jew

Misconstrues for sensitivity ...

You were a medieval troubadour

Who somehow wandered into a lawyer’s office

And could not find your way back again (28)

These are astute comments, except the last lines,...

Despite Mordecai Richler’s repeated and vigorous denials that he had in any way been influenced by A.M. Klein, literary scholars and critics now generally agree that Klein’s The Second Scroll¹ serves as an important literary source of Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman.² Indeed, the striking resemblances between the two novels fairly leap to view. Nevertheless, until the present chapter, scholars have neglected any single-minded examination of how and to what extent St. Urbain’s Horseman draws upon The Second Scroll and exactly how and to what extent it transforms, and perhaps even critiques, the material upon which it draws. Ira Nadel’s discerning,...

A considerable consensus has developed among critics, especially evident since the appearance of Usher Caplan’s Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A.M. Klein (1982), suggesting that much of Klein’s life as a writer was tragic, or at least that he agonized about the relative lack of recognition of his oeuvre during his lifetime. This narrative, reproduced in various forms in articles, books, and encyclopaedia entries, goes more or less as follows: after more than two decades of rather prodigious literary and journalistic production, in which Klein established himself as “the first contributor of authentic Jewish poetry to the English...

In a 1964 speech at the Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Leonard Cohen criticized A.M. Klein, a poet he greatly admired, because “Klein chose to be a priest though it was as a prophet that we needed him” (qtd. in Siemerling 147). Convinced that Klein’s nervous breakdown in the 1950s was a result of his attempt to reconcile the roles of poet and “theorist of the Jewish party line,” Cohen styled his public persona in the 1960s as that of a renegade prophet. However, Cohen’s priestly inclinations became pronounced in subsequent years, particularly in Book of Mercy (1984). Indeed, Ira...