Because you can never have enough A.M. Klein. And you can also never have enough of the ego-inflating A+ top-of-the-class thing. A gentile Brit being an "expert" at Jewish Canadians...well I never.
(This essay is long. But it has sub-headings which I put a lot of thought into to break up the longness, and I did it all for you).
‘The Angel Who Sang’: The Transcending Voice of A.
M. Klein
By Hannah Barr
No discussion of Jewish Canadian culture and
literature is complete without mention of Abraham Moses Klein. The son of
Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century, Klein
was a lawyer and influential member of the Montreal Jewish Canadian community
who has been posthumously recognized as one of the foremost and exceptional examples
of not only Jewish Canadian, but also Montreal literature. A talented poet,
accomplished essayist and author of a novel regarded as a seminal classic, Klein
had a far-reaching voice in his life and career. It was a voice which
transcended religion, nationality and language; a voice which earned him a
great deal of respect; a voice which he ultimately and tragically lost. But it
was through his multifaceted voice that Klein was able to so eloquently capture
the world as he saw it: the immigrant world, the Jewish community in Montreal,
the Jewish Diaspora itself, the Francophone Canada and the sense of being the
minority, the persecuted. Writing during a period where the world changed
irrevocably, where evil was made tangible in the form of cattle cars and
crematoria and hope given a geographical boundary in the Middle East, Klein’s
poetic voice was not his, but lent to the communities he belonged to. The result
is an incomparable, far-reaching voice which transcends the normal community
markers, that seeks out the glimpses of hope and champions them above all.
A
Jewish Voice
There can be no doubt as to Klein’s foremost
heritage; he ‘was a child of two worlds…the first was the world of East
European Judaism, whose ethos and life ways his parents brought with them
across the ocean from a town called Ratno, in the province of Vlohynia, in the
northwestern Ukraine.’
Klein’s fundamental voice was Jewish – at least culturally if not necessarily
religiously, and his Jewishness finds its articulation in his poetry in
particular, which presents the reader with a daunting challenge: ‘to fully
appreciate Klein’s work, the reader must be well versed in Judaic studies and
in several languages, know how to appreciate all literary genres and be an
expert on the subject of immigration of the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe
– a formidable assignment indeed.’ An
example of Klein’s Jewishness pervading his poetry can be seen in his work
‘Portraits of a Minyan’ which was originally published in his collection, Hath Not A Jew. It takes its title
‘Minyan’ from ‘the quorum of ten adult Jewish males required for public
worship.’
Thus, the poem is structured around ten different sections for ten separate
voices including the ‘Pintele Yid’ which translates as ‘little dot of a Jew’,
the ‘Shadchan’ or ‘matchmaker’ and ‘The Man Moses Was Meek’ which is a
paraphrase of Numbers 12:3, ‘Now the man Moses was very meek.’
The poem is replete with Yiddish words and
phrases as well as being heavy-laden with Jewish images and references, doing
justice to Klein’s Jewish education. Furthermore, there are several Talmudic
references in ‘Portraits of a Minyan’ which demonstrate how thoroughly
ingrained the most intimate of Jewish traditions and theologies were in Klein.
In the section in the voice of ‘Reb Abraham,’ Klein writes, ‘And at Messiah’s
greeting,/ Reb Abraham’s set plan/ Is to make goodley eating/ Of roast
Leviathan.’
The imagery in this stanza pertains to the idea in Jewish tradition that when
the Messiah arrives, his coming will be celebrated by a feast of roast
leviathan or a feast of roast devil, (Leviathan is the name given to the
biblical monster of hell). Another example of Klein’s Jewish identity as
demonstrated through Jewish religiosity is in his use of Hebrew in ‘Portraits
of a Minyan.’ In the section ‘Sophist’ there is the following stanza: ‘That
skull replete with pilpul tricks/ Has long returned to its matrix,/ Where worms
split hair, where Death confutes/ The hope the all-too-hopeful moots.’
Klein uses a Hebrew term, ‘pilpul’ which is the ‘dialectical logic used in the
study of Talmud.’
The ease with which Klein is able to use both Yiddish and Hebrew phrases and
references garnered from an in-depth study of Judaism demonstrates the high
level of Klein’s Jewish religious literacy, knowledge and understanding which
would put him in good stead for his public roles within the Jewish community
both in Montreal and eventually elsewhere. When it comes to interpreting and
examining Klein’s voice, it is crucial to recognize its intrinsically Jewish
roots.
Despite being well-versed and acquainted with
the Jewish religion, Jewish religiosity is not the zenith of Klein’s Jewish
identity, rather his most authentic Jewish voice is that which literarily
radiates a cultural Jewishness as opposed to a religious Jewishness. This is
most obviously seen in Klein’s poem ‘Heirloom’ a spectacularly poignant piece
written between 1932 and 1934. It was written following the death of Klein’s
father and centres on the heirloom of a Bible brought to Canada from Europe,
which had been passed down through the generations. The poem itself is a
paradoxical lament and eulogizing of his father’s actions. For example, ‘the
snuff left on this page’
which is ‘brown and old’
paints an intimate portrait of Klein’s father studying the Bible whilst
sniffing tobacco so as not to break the Sabbath by striking a match. The
religious identity of Klein’s father is further seen when it describes the book
with ‘tallow stains of midnight liturgy’
implying a certain amount of religious devotion. Klein’s tone is one of pride
when he describs the stained book as ‘my coat of arms’, a
combination of both religious heritage and his father’s idiosyncrasies left
behind on the paper. Such a connection between Klein and a Jewish heritage is
compounded by the rhyme scheme connecting ‘liturgy’ and ‘ancestry.’
Furthermore, Klein’s affection for the tradition of his father is demonstrated
when he describes it as a ‘noble lineage’, reiterating his joy with an
exclamation mark at the sentence end.
The final stanza turns from pride and joy in
the Jewish traditions of his father, and vicariously, his ancestors, to
complete mourning and vulnerability. Klein writes, ‘my tears, too have stained
this heirloomed ground.’ There is an absolute beauty to this image, despite its
melancholy tone, as it is a strong image of the father-son bond and seals the
heirloom as belonging to Klein: a stain from each man, tobacco and tears, forms
a lasting, unique stain like the unique impact each made upon the other’s life.
Furthermore, because Klein’s tears fall upon a holy book, there is again the
strong sense of Klein mourning for a religious faith or a connection to
religion that his father’s life had sustained; there may even be a sense of
regret that he is not truly his father’s son if the mark he leaves upon the
book is not one from religious study, devotion to the faith. Thus, the lament
of ‘Heirloom’ exposes Klein’s lack of religious Jewish voice, but cements in
him a strongly culturally Jewish voice; ‘although there is no denying Klein’s
affection for his father’s books, they no longer represent a living tradition
to him.’
It is this voice which becomes Klein’s most prominent and permeates his
writings the most, it is his culturally Jewish voice which becomes the
strongest expression of the most significant immigrant community in the
province of Quebec.
An Immigrant Voice
Despite not being
born in Canada, it was to a Canadian city that Klein felt perhaps the strongest
geographical affiliation with: Montreal; ‘Montreal was Klein’s city, and
affection for this city runs through all of Klein’s work.’
The Montreal community Klein was most intimately connected with was the
immigrant Jewish community which expanded rapidly during Klein’s lifetime. His
observations of this new form of Jewry, this quasi-Canadian but utterly Jewish
community are given voice in some of his poetry, not always to the edification
of the community. In ‘Dialogue’, the New World is portrayed negatively by ‘the
two shawl-covered grannies, buying fish’
who ‘yearn for Ratno’s muds’
and then ‘they sigh; they shake their heads; they both conspire/ To doom
Columbus to eternal fire.’
The latter phrase is ‘a reference to the proverbial Yiddish expression “a curse
on Columbus”’
for discovering the New World in which they now reside. ‘Dialogue’ is Klein’s
satirical take on the steadfast, (a less diplomatic stance would say stubborn),
attitude of some of the older generation within the Jewish community in
Montreal toward the Old World where traditions were not under threat from the
modernism which was infiltrating Canadian, and therefore Montreal, society.
Klein’s poetry also captures the
idiosyncrasies of the Jewish community of Montreal in his poem, ‘Saturday
Night.’ Klein describes, ‘It being no longer Sabbath, angels scrawl/ The stars
upon the sky; and Main Street thrives./…Obese Jewesses, wheeling triplets,
crawl/ Along the gibbering thoroughfare./…Hebraic arms tell jokes that are not
funny.’
The Main Street to which Klein is referring to is St Lawrence Boulevard, the
old Jewish Main Street, and his sardonic portrayal of the Jewish woman is heavy
on irony and lacking in compassion. Nevertheless, such day-to-day activity of
the Jewish immigrant community in Montreal could not have been captured by
anyone lacking an inherently immigrant Jewish voice. Hence, Klein is able to
bring this intriguing and burgeoning community to life through his poetry,
juxtaposing Old World ideals against New World situations; and he cannot escape
his affection for it: ‘the world of Jewish Montreal in which he grew up
underwent changes during his lifetime, and in certain respects disappeared.’
Klein can bring to life this community because it is the community in which he
is embedded. What makes Klein’s voice for this community so ground-breaking,
however, is that it is fundamentally an Anglophone voice from a Yiddish and
Eastern European linguistic tradition.
The interaction between the Jewish immigrant
community of Montreal and the New World situation they find themselves in is
given voice by Klein in his poems which explore Jewish and French Canadian
relations. ‘The French Canadians made up almost sixty per cent of the
population of Montreal at the time of Klein’s arrival, and possessed the
political and institutional power that made them one of two dominant groups,
along with the Anglos.’
This institutional power was most evidently manifested through the Roman
Catholic Church and Klein explores the interactions between immigrant Jews and
established Catholics in many of his poems. Perhaps the most famous example of
this is Klein’s poem ‘For The Sisters of Hotel Dieu’ which is written out of
his childhood experience in a hospital where he was under the care of Roman
Catholic nuns, after having broken his leg in a skiing accident. Klein images
the nuns as birds, a reference to the pre-Vatican II styles of robes which did
indeed make those in Holy Orders look bird-like. He writes, ‘O biblic birds,/
who fluttered to me in my childhood illnesses/ – me little, afraid, ill, not of
your race’
and explicitly mentions the cultural dividing line present between Catholicism
and Judaism. Yet, unlike the satirical portrayals of his Jewish immigrant kin,
Klein’s voice here proffers nothing but affection for his Catholic carers and
fellow Montreal residents. The poem continues with fervent thanks for his
carers and calls for them to ‘be praised’ thereby invoking inherently Christian
language.
When Klein vocalizes admiration or conveys
endearment towards his Catholic counterparts, there is almost a sense of
longing for the religious fervour they exude. In his poem ‘The Cripples’ a
piece of work which is exceedingly contentious amongst contemporary scholars,
Klein expresses a nuanced envy for the faith of the Catholics he interacts
with. Describing injured patients in hospital in their hope for recovery, Klein
writes, ‘their look, their hope, and the idee
fixe of their maim, –/ knowing the surgery’s in the heart./…God mindful of
the sparrows on the stairs?/ Yes, to their faith this mountain of stairs, is
not!’
The sheer strength of faith in the eponymous heroes of the poem, that God will
heal them of their various life-impeding ailments, stirs a sense of jealousy
within Klein. Faith and religion is a marker for these people, an identity
foundation stone which Klein does not have, belong to a Jewish immigrant
community which was centred on ethnic rather than religious lines. Klein ‘could
not help but perceive [the Catholic French Canadians] through the lens of his
Jewishness,’
especially because ‘his basically conservative nature was attuned to the traditionalism
of French Canada as he knew it in the thirties and forties, wherein he saw
upheld life’s simple, eternal verities: faith and family, order and common
humanity.’
However, there was a much stronger and far more potent voice in Klein than the
immigrant Jewish voice looking at the Catholic Montreal; there was an
Anglophone voice in a Francophone world. The voice Klein worked as consciously,
‘almost a separate dialect – that would express as faithfully as possible the
content of the Jewish civilization in a rich, authentic English.’
An Anglophone Voice
Arguably the ‘most
vivid among the aspects of Klein’s work that continues to resonate for new
readers is no doubt his love for Montreal and the original ways in which he
captured the atmosphere of his “jargoning city.”’
Language in Klein’s Montreal was the cornerstone of a person’s identity and it
was this linguistic marker which resonated so powerfully within Klein that
manifested itself in some of his most exquisite poetry. As much as his identity
was rooted in a cultural Jewishness, ‘at every moment of his life, Klein was
both Quebecois and Jewish, deeply concerned with his personal well-being and
the well-being of the Jewish people, yet living in the midst of a great
metropolitan society impregnated with an incipient Quebecitude.’
Klein had ‘an intuition that these two peoples shared a difficult experience in
common in their recent history, and that they had acquired little in a world
where neither force of arms nor strength of numbers belonged to them.’
What the Quebecois and Montreal Jewish community shared was an isolating
culture, an infusion of religion and language alien to the Canadian majority;
Klein realized this, inherently understood it, and articulated his empathy
emphatically in his rhetoric.
In a collection
of poems published in The Rocking Chair,
Klein gave an Anglophone overview of a Francophone Montreal and the province of
Quebec as a whole. The collection was, ‘to a considerable degree, the product
of a rare, invigorating burst of patriotism that affected many Canadians in the
immediate aftermath of the Second World War,’ a
period which also saw ‘a profound transformation of the relations between the
Jewish community and the intellectual and political elite of Francophone
Quebec.’
Despite the transformation taking place in Montreal and the province as a
whole, Klein’s poems portray a traditional, idyllic and unchanging world. He is
quoted as saying, ‘the French Canadian enjoys much – a continuing and
distinctive culture, solidarity, land
– which I would wish for my own people.’
The idealized Quebec is most clearly seen in Klein’s poem ‘The Rocking Chair’
which ‘introduces into Klein’s poetry
gentle contemplation of daily life, which he describes as a kind of
lingering, perpetual experience:’
‘It seconds the crickets of the province. Heard/ in the clean lamptlit
farmhouses of Quebec, – / wooden, – it is no less a national bird.’
Quebec represented consistency yet, paradoxically, also embraced what is seen
in ‘The Rocking Chair’ ‘as a community embroiled in change; and the tradition
to which it appeals for its survival in the face of history is itself
continuously shaped and reshaped by history, through a dialectical process
symbolized by the ‘sunken pendulum’ of the endlessly rocking rocking-chair.’
By portraying the city of Montreal and the wider province of Quebec as a
sublime creation, Klein is able to project a desire for a homeland onto this New
World which he is inescapably a part of.
However, Klein’s greatest celebration of his
Montreal is to be found in his multi-lingual writings; ‘drawing upon the strong
traditions and languages that he knew – English, French, Yiddish, Hebrew –
Klein was able to play “across” languages and to develop a poetic practice that
was polyglot and innovative.’
Furthermore, multilingualism was Klein’s distinct experience and the mixture of
languages from the holiness of Hebrew to the New World’s French dialect ‘made
absolute sense in the context of Montreal and represented an ordered interface
rather than a chaos.’
As an Anglophone writer, it was a mark of Klein’s determination to be heard by
a wider audience, rather than limiting himself to the confined ideological and
cultural audience mind-set he would have been subject to had he chosen to write
and publish in Yiddish. However, the ease with which Klein was able to
incorporate English and French into his poetry has secured his legacy within
French Canadian literature. Furthermore, such a mastery of bilingualism
emphasizes Klein’s talent for capturing his surroundings and turning them into
enduring poems.
In the poem ‘Montreal’ which was part of
Klein’s body of work he referred to as his Quebec
Poems, he plays on language to create a bilingual poem. When it first
appeared in publication, the poem came with a note ‘signed A.M.K: “Suiting
language to theme, the following verse, - as will be noted, is written in a
vocabulary which is not exactly orthodox English. It is written so that any
Englishman who knows no French, and any Frenchman who knows no English (save prepositions
– the pantomime of inflection) can read it intelligently. It contains not a
word, substantive, adjectival, or operative, which is not either similar to,
derivative from, or akin to a French word of like import; in short, a bilingual
poem.”’ The
final part of the fourth stanza reads, ‘cherish the/ Joined double-melodied
vocabuliare/ Where English vocable and roll Ecossic,/ Mollified by the parle of
French/ Bilinguefact your air!’
This stanza is representative of the general theme of the poem as a whole; it
is a celebration of language and the histories, traditions and cultures which
have crafted the distinct dictions and dialects – what Klein cherishes most is
the bilingual nature of Montreal. In 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…for Klein, language is
not merely a code as a means of communication; rather, it is the individual
speech of a singular person in particular circumstances, for which none other
could be substituted.’
Perhaps the most striking thing about ‘Montreal’ is its neglect of the
immigrant Jewish community’s impact on Montreal. Klein pays homage to its
inhabitants through the ages: the English, the Indian, the coureur de bois, the Scottish and its increasingly secular
community – but no mention is given of the Jews, Poles and Ukrainian immigrants
to the city. One could argue this is not an intentional slight on Klein’s part,
particularly as his poems from this period were a concerted effort to create an
ode to Quebec. Nevertheless, one wonders whether by this point Klein was
already beginning to feel his Jewish community as a yoke rather than a movement
to be celebrated in poetry.
A Threatened Voice
‘”There is a lunatic abroad in Europe; and
the world had better give heed…a conquering nation does not treat its prisoners
of war with that ruthlessness with which the German Reich has treated its
Jewish citizens.’”
Klein was acutely aware that there were problems in Europe and that the
virulent anti-Semitism was beginning to permeate his French-Canadian situation;
he was concerned about how his neighbours would react to the impending war and
‘about their response to the plight of European Jewry.’
He had every right to be concerned; the French Montreal daily Le Devoir opposed the admission of
Jewish refugees to Canada. In response, Klein ‘questioned the Christian piety
of the paper’s editor: “Let him remember what is written in the New Testament
about that man who, when he beheld a fellow-man beset by thieves and murderers,
bleeding and sore afflicted, turned his head and crossed to the other side of
the street. For that is precisely what [the editor] has done.”’
Klein wrote a
series of politically-charged poems criticising the anti-Semitism he was
finding himself to be surrounded by. In his poem ‘Political Meeting’ Klein’s
dedication reads ‘For Camillien Houde’ the 1930s Mayor of Montreal who
campaigned against conscripting Canadian men to fight in the Second World War.
In a pre-War context, ‘Klein had always looked upon Houde with affection as the
quintessential French Canadian folk hero, a leader with the common touch, a
born raconteur and wily orator whose speeches he frequently enjoyed attending.
Now Houde’s appeal to the blood brotherhood of his people pained and baffled
Klein, who knew very well the emotional tug of racial kinship, yet feared its
explosive power.’
The emotion of fear is prevalent in ‘Political Meeting’ where the poetic Houde
employs the most crafted of rhetorical skills: ‘Where are your songs?/ The whole street wears one face,/ shadowed and
grim; and in the darkness rises/ the body-odour of race.’
It is Klein’s ‘most successful evocation of the Francophone milieu of Montreal’
and his concern over the threat to his people led him to write ‘scathing
articles attacking Francophones who had been stricken with the virus of
anti-Semitism.’
What is most striking about ‘Political Meeting’ is that Klein implies through
it that the two communities, Francophone and Jewish, despite sharing so much in
common, still suffer from schismatic differences which in the poem is suggested
to be religion. The poem’s speaker ‘praises the virtue of being Canadien,/ of being at peace, of faith,
of family.’
A firmly cultural barrier has been set up to the detriment and salvation of
European Jewry and it does not go unnoticed, or un-vocalized, by Klein.
A Hopeful Voice
‘The linguistic and architectural hybridity
of his immigrant neighbourhood confirmed his identity as a citizen of the
Jewish Diaspora in North America’
and gave rise to Klein’s most influential voice in his contemporary setting. He
‘understood his time and place as part of a series echoing the events of the
past, the moments of tension and fusion that are the experience of the Jewish
Diaspora’
and Klein knew that he had to lend his voice to making known the experience of
the Jewish Diaspora in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1942, ‘the first
documented reports of the organized mass murder of the Jews of Europe reached
the West’
and Klein told his readers in the Jewish
Canadian Chronicle that July that ‘the world’s silence…was “eloquent of
nothing so much as a sense of its own guilt.”’
As Klein became increasingly more influential in the Montreal Jewish community,
so his profile in the North American Jewish Diaspora as a whole became more
prominent. At its zenith in 1949, ‘the Canadian Jewish Congress proposed to
send him for the month of August on a fact-finding mission to Israel, Europe
and the North Africa.’
For Klein, this was an opportunity to great to assign a concrete value to; a
Zionist, he projected his hope into the formation of the Nation State of Israel
and was greatly concerned with its progress. He said, ‘my life was, and is,
bound to the country of my father’s choice, to Canada: but this intelligence,
issuing, as it did, from that quarter of the globe which had ever been to me
the holiest of the map’s bleeding stigmata, the Palestine whose geography was
as intimately known as the lines on the palm of my hand, filled me with pride,
with exaltation, with an afflatus odorous of the royal breath of Solomon.’
Upon his return from the Holy Land, Klein set about writing his only novel, The Second Scroll, a work of art and a
work of hope.
The Second Scroll is arguably
quasi-autobiographical; certainly Klein’s narrative voice shares many
attributes with Klein’s legitimate voice: both are sent by employers to the
Holy Land, both are from Montreal, both are seeking something from the new-born
Israel. Through the novel, Klein’s hopeful voice is portrayed as a messianic
hope through the character of Uncle Melech: ‘the pursuit is one of Melech
Davidson, that is King, son of David; it is a messianic pursuit.’
In a literary context, the Messiah credentials of Uncle Melech are clear to
see. His connections with the biblical David and kingship connect him with the
Messianic prophecies seen in the Hebrew Bible from the books of the prophets,
Isaiah and Micah in particular. Furthermore, Klein employs more subtle
theological intricacies within Melech’s character which really cement his
Messiah identity. The narrator’s pursuit of his uncle is seemingly futile and
he comments that he felt he was missing Melech ‘by an arm’s length’
which implies the immanence or omnipresence of the Messiah, and suggests ‘the
doctrine of the attributes of God according to which philosophical “views” of
God are possible but never precise.’
This idea is compounded in the chapter ‘Numbers’ when the narrator is given a
photograph of his uncle: ‘all my life I had waited for this picture, and now at
last I was to see him. Uncle Melech plain! She handed me the snapshot. It
showed a man standing in the midst of a group of barefooted boys. But his face
– Uncle Melech had again eluded me. It was a double, a multiple exposure!’
There are two
Messiah figures in The Second Scroll,
the first is the character of Uncle Melech and the second is Israel itself, a
personification of salvation for the Jewish Diaspora: ‘the contemporary Messiah
is the totality of Israel, the latter day elan
vital of our people.’
Just as in Israel ‘the nephew finds not Uncle Melech, but the Melech in
everything around him’
so, too, does Klein find salvific hope symbolically in the tangible Israel. For
Klein, ‘the creation of Israel…became for him a divine manifestation, a modern
miracle, meaningful beyond its national significance...he saw in it a proof
that divine energy was struggling toward a finer mode of existence, toward an
ultimate triumph of righteousness, no matter how hopeless this cause might seem.
Evil was being eliminated by the counterthrust of the creative principle.’
Israel is messianic in nature within The
Second Scroll because it offers refuge to Melech who represent the
every-Jew. The narrator reads a letter from Melech detailing his experiences in
a Nazi concentration camp; ‘I scan the tattooed arms – the man before me bears
the number 12165 – and wonder whether it is in gematria that there lies the
secret of their engravure.’
Klein uses gematria, the ‘cabalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew
Scriptures by interchanging words, whose letters have the same numerical
value,’
to explicitly articulate hope for post-Holocaust Jewry as 12165 in Hebrew
letters means “He has come.”
For Klein, Israel
was ‘symbolic of rebirth – as the home of a people almost exterminated’
and a tangible, corporeal home for the Jewish Diaspora. Despite being loyal to
Canada and the Jewish Diaspora there, the hope that Israel offered Klein cannot
be understated, regardless of the fact that he never returned to the Holy Land
after his first visit. His return to Canada saw him wax lyrical about Israel
and about its promise; he had been ‘present at the rebirth of this people,
their return to life.’
Yet, there is something about The Second
Scroll which, whilst undeniably hopeful, is tainted by another, albeit
greatly nuanced, voice. Is the novel’s narrator simply a thinly-veiled
Klein-voice, vocalizing the need for Canada to realize the atrocities meted out
to Jewry in Europe, from pogroms to concentration camps, a disdain and neglect
for Jewry which Canada itself was guilty of when it came to Jewish refugees? In
many ways, The Second Scroll is a warning;
there is a sense of foreboding when it comes to the hope for worldwide Jewry.
The image of the Messiah which Klein leaves the reader with is not a
theologically-typical one. Instead, the novel ends with Melech’s murder, he is
‘anointed, with gasoline.’
It is a loaded image, perhaps even a metaphor foreshadowing the tumultuous
events of Israel-Palestine and the resulting justification of anti-Semitism by
being anti-Israel. Klein’s voice with regards to Israel is one of hope, but it
is a faltering voice nonetheless.
A Silenced Voice
‘O, I have seen these touched ones - /Their
fallow looks, their barren eyes – For whom have perished all the suns/ And
vanished all fertilities.’
Hindsight renders Klein’s poem ‘A Prayer of Abraham, Against Madness’ the most
devastating of his career. At the beginning of the 1950s, ‘Klein suffered a
gradual mental breakdown from which he never fully recovered…by the end of the
decade he had lapsed into an almost total silence, which remained unbroken
until his death in 1972.’
There has been much speculation as to what contributed to Klein’s silence,
certainly it seems to have been a conglomeration of evils. The seminal
autobiography on Klein does not reach any concrete conclusion, but does note
that ‘premonitions of mental illness seem to occur in Klein’s writings of the
early forties…that Klein of all people would one day succumb to mental illness
was certainly the last possibility that any of his friends or family could have
imagined.’
According to Klein’s son, Colman, it was Klein’s voice for the Jewish Canadian
Diaspora which ravaged his throat, citing overwork and exhaustion as the major
cause for his breakdown. Klein certainly bore the burden of being his
community’s spokesman, ‘from late 1949 until the fall of 1952 Klein spent about
half his time travelling and speaking all across the United States and
Canada…and for a while was probably the single most popular speaker on the
United Jewish Appeal circuit.’
In 1961, the
latest and most fashionable addition to the Jewish Canadian literary scene
published a collection of poems including one called ‘To A Teacher.’ The poet
was Leonard Cohen, the teacher in his poem, A. M. Klein. In Cohen’s poem he
describes Klein as ‘Hurt once and for all into silence./ A long pain ending
without a song to prove it.’
Cohen asks of Klein, ‘Did you confuse the Messiah in a mirror?’
Thus, the suggestion from Cohen is that Klein perhaps thought he was in some
way a messianic figure for his community, or maybe just a messianic
representative or force. This view is arguably the most striking and resonates
most strongly with the various voices of Klein, all fighting for hope and
restoration and acceptance, all struggling under the weight of the evils of the
world. Klein became increasingly frustrated and hopeless and this
‘self-destructive element in his character seemed to emerge out of some
deeply-rooted Messiah complex.’
His voice could not withstand the pressure: ‘The angel who wept looked into the
eyes of God./ The angel who sang ceased pointing to the earth./ A little
cherub, now glimpsing God’s work flaw’d,/ Went mad,’
went silent.
A.M. Klein had a
beautiful voice; one which was not afraid to be Jewish in the New World, nor to
be Anglophone in a Francophone setting. It was a voice which spoke against evil
and for perseverance, which championed hope and made noise for what he deemed
to be the righteous thing to do. But being so many voices for so many people
took its toll, a devastating toll for a writer, an artist, for man for whom
words were more than communication but an expression of the most intimate form.
Klein is today recognized for being the voice for his contemporary Jewish
community during a period when evil had conspired against Jewry as whole. He is
also now celebrated for his written voice and the contributions of his writings
to the literary scene of Montreal. Klein’s situation led him into silence, it
is for his readers today to return his voice to him by celebrating his talent,
by releasing his voice.
Bibliography
Anctil, P., ‘A. M. Klein: The Poet and His Relations with French
Quebec’ in Menkis, R., and Ravvin, N., The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader, (Red Deer, 2004).
Caplan, U., Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A. M. Klein, (McGill-Hill
Ryerson, 1982).
Cohen, L., The Spice-Box of Earth, (Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1961).
Fischer, G., In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and Ethics in the Writings of A. M.
Klein, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975).
Gotileb, P., ‘Hassidic Influences
in the Work of A. M. Klein’ in The Klein
Symposium, Mayne, S., (ed.), (University of Ottawa Press, 1975).
Hyman, R., Aught from Nought: A. M. Klein’s ‘The Second Scroll’, (University
of Victoria Press, 1999).
Kattan, N., A. M. KleinL Poet and Prophet, (XYZ Publishing, 2001).
Klein, A. M. Selected Poems, Pollock, Z., Mayne, S., and Caplan, U., (eds),
(University of Toronto Press, 1997).
Klein, A. M., The Letters, Popham, E., (ed.),
(University of Toronto Press, 2011).
Klein, A. M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland and
Stewart Ltd., 1969).
Melancon, R., ‘A Writer For Our Age: Notes on Voice in A. M. Klein’s
Poetry and Prose’ in Ravvin, N., Failure’s
Opposite: Listening to A. M. Klein, (McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2011).
Pollock, Z., A. M. Klein: The Story of the Poet, (University of Toronto Press,
1994).
Pollock, Z., Mayne, S. and Caplan, U., ‘Notes’ in Klein, A. M. Selected Poems, Pollock, Z., Mayne, S.,
and Caplan, U., (eds), (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
Ravvin, N., ‘Introduction’ in Ravvin, N., Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A. M. Klein, (McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2011).
Simon, S., ‘Montreal, Dublin, Prague, Jerusalem, and the Others: A. M.
Klein’s Cities’ in Ravvin, N., Failure’s
Opposite: Listening to A. M. Klein, (McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2011).
Spiro, S., Tapestry for Designs: Judaic Allusions in ‘The Second Scroll’ and the
Collected Poems of A. M. Klein, (University of British Columbia Press,
1984).
