From his outpost on the shores of Lake Ontario, that curious American onlooker Leslie Fiedler observes that the Jewish writer in Canada inhabits a “No-man’s–Land, the Demilitarized Zone” where he is “invisible from South of the Borders a well as from the Other Side of the Atlantic.”¹ While Fiedler singles out Leonard Cohen and Mordecai Richler, he overlooks the founder of Jewish–Canadian literature, Abraham Moses Klein — an ironic oversight since Fiedler’s first novel,The Second Stone, appeared a decade after Klein’sThe Second Scrollfirst appeared in 1951. Other names need to be added to those mentioned...

When Klein saw the cover design of his book, he wrote enthusiastically to his publisher: “The Second Scroll bursting forth — as from flame — from behind the curled parchment of the first — that was an inspiration! A new and improved form of the palimpsest! Above all, a commentary.”¹ Endless commentary, in the form of five glosses inThe Second Scroll, is in a talmudic tradition of explaining and amplifying the first scroll, and in turn Klein’s exegetical peregrinations match the endless wandering of his narrator and Uncle Melech throughout the Diaspora. As Klein travels through the first half...

Before writingThe Second Scroll, A.M. Klein publishedThe Hitleriad, a mock-epic poem contravening Theodor Adorno’s famous injunction, “No poetry after Auschwitz.”¹ ButThe Hitleriadlacked the necessary historical distance for coping with the enormity of the Holocaust: satiric, Augustan rhyming couplets proved inadequate to this unparalleled tragedy, and by the time Klein had grasped the historical perspective, he succumbed to silence, as if in obeisance to Adorno’s prophetic caveat. Klein’s successors — most notably Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Eli Mandel — with the advantage of historical distance have achieved some of the means of expression for arriving at...

Like Freud, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Stefan Zweig, Martin Buber, and many other Jewish-Austrian writers, Henry Kreisel fled the Anschluss in 1938, leaving behind a highly developed European Jewish culture on the verge of destruction. After settling in Canada, Kreisel had to learn a new idiom for his fictional world, and he turned to Klein’s writing as one model.The Second Scrollprovided him with a transatlantic quest motif that combines Jewish roots in Canada and Europe — a diasporic response to Kreisel’s own wandering. His short stories and novels explore a poetics of absence, the doppelgänger motif for doubly...

In his short story, “A Canadian Upbringing,” Norman Levine invents a writer, Alexander Marsden, a composite of A.M. Klein (similar initials) and Mordecai Richler (similar scansion). Marsden’s short book,A Canadian Upbringing, describes Montreal’s warm, lively ghetto atmosphere — its strong family and religious ties as well as its judices and limitations. By the end of the book, he decides to leave Canada for England where he hopes to find for himself a wider view of life: Marsden’s pattern provides the blueprint for Levine’s Jewish-Canadian upbringing — up from the ghetto, out of the streets, down and out across the...

In an introduction to his first novel, Jack Ludwig invents a beginning in his frozen city teeming with a northern immigrant mix: “I sing confusion, I, Jack Ludwig, myself confused, or, to put it another way, a come-home Winnipegger. Half my adult life I lived in Canada, the other in the U.S.A., is it any wonder that when I sayI’m going homeI don’t know where I’m heading?”¹ This mock–heroic testimonial to Homer and Whitman announces Ludwig’s North American split, a rupture further complicated by his Jewish background where a highly developed ironic sensibility guides him through multiple...

The epic scope of Adele Wiseman’s fiction encompasses Canadian vastness, Russian roots, and a biblical world of history and myth. Describing her Manitoban background, Wiseman sketches a Chagallian bird in flight, refers to the Noah’s Ark of her childhood and Tower of Babel of her adolescence, and offers a childhood painting of the prairies:

There was the sky. Always the sky. Not just to look up to, that blue in the dominant, but to look round at, yes, down at even, from the precarious shelf of prairie to look down at an underlying horizon ... Here you hang in the...

In “Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens” (1931), Klein champions Spinoza for his own nonconformist attitude towards Orthodox Jewry: “Is it a marvel, then, that he forsook the abracadabra of the synagogue, and holding with timelessness a duologue, deciphered a new scripture in the book? Is it a marvel that het lef old fraud for passion intellectual of God?” After these rhetorical questions he concludes the poem with a portrait of Spinoza gathering flowers, the “ever-unwedded lover of the Lord.”¹ This lyrical image of Spinoza plucking tulips in the garden of Mynheer would appeal to Leonard Cohen whose...

Annie Kriegel, who watches the Jewish–American literary scene from her home in France, discerns a progression from one generation of novelists — Cahan, Gold, and Schulberg — preoccupied with the question “Où courent–ils?” to the next generation — Bellow, Malamud, and Roth — who ask instead “Pourquoi courir?”¹ Both questions seem especially pertinent to many of Mordecai Richler’s protagonists who often run a frenzied race away from origins towards elusive goals, while their antagonists meet with accidents that may cause temporary or permanent paralysis. This running motif represents an accelerated version or parody of the Wandering Jew who...

One of Monique Bosco’s volumes of poetry,Schabbat 70–77, opens with a section entitled “Voyages d’exil” and ends with a prose poem: “La loi de la dispersion est respectée aux quatre coins de la terre. On honore 1’héritage du juif errant.”¹ Born in Vienna (like Henry Kreisel), educated in France and, after the war, in Montreal, Bosco abides by the laws of the Diaspora in most of her writing, expressing her displacement in forms of almost meetings, loss, and absence. In an exchange with Derrida she complains about the loss of her mother tongue, German, and citing the example...

In an appreciative article, “A.M. Klein: Modernité et Loyauté,” Naim Kattan outlines Klein’s peripheral position with respect to English and Jewish literary traditions. James Joyce, who introduced Klein to modernism, showed him resemblances between the Irish and Jewish situation: “marginal à la puissance britannique, de filiation extraterritoriale, il donnait 1’exemple dé 1’adhésion au grand tout mais une adhésion à ses propres conditions, une adhésion dont il établissait lui-même les termes. Les moments d’exaltation alternent avec des haltes de réflexion, de retour sur soi.”¹ While Joyce and Klein share self–reflexiveness and exile from the mainstream of English culture and the...

Matt Cohen has been generally recognized for his series of Salem novels which explore the life of agrarian, Protestant families living in the area around Kingston, Ontario. More recently, however, he has turned to his Jewish roots,The Colours of War(1977) being a pivotal novel as it treats Salem from a peripheral, Jewish perspective. Theodore Beam, whose lover remarks, “Theodore Beam. What a name for a Jew.”¹, narrates this story from the attic of an old stone church in Salem. In the words of his father, Jacob Beam, who speaks in “Talmudic fashion” (223), this is – an excellent place...

Towards the end of his writing career, Klein wrote “In Praise of the Diaspora” (1953), a long speech he never delivered. In this eulogy, Klein personifies the Diaspora as “Uncle Galuth,” an affectionate kinsman recalling that other paradigmatic wanderer, Uncle Melech Davidson. Ever the rhetorician and dialectician in his silent speech, Klein remains ambiguous on his position regarding Zion and Diaspora: initially, he champions the former to discredit the latter, but soon shifts his praise to trace the rich and varied history of the Jews during the past two millenia. His talmudic defense of equivocation is aimed not at perfection...