A. M. Klein (1909-1972), journalist and lawyer, was widely regarded as one of Canada's leading poets. His novel The Second Scroll has been acclaimed by scholars and critics as a masterpiece. He contributed significantly to the emergence of a modern,...

Abraham Moses Klein, born of immigrant parents, Colman and Yetta Morantz Klein, in 1909, was brought up in Montreal and, except for the year 1937-1938 spent practicing law in Rouyn, Quebec, lived his life there. His formative years were spent in the...

Milton M. Klein, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Tennessee, died in Knoxville on June 10, 2004, at age eighty-six. His death brought to an end a long career of distinguished scholarship, service, and teaching. Born August 15, 1917, in New...

by Zailig Pollock. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pp. 336. $60.00, cloth; $25.95, paper. It is not uncommon for criticism of contemporary literature to favor authors who perform fashionable gestures that identify them with some easily recognized school. To...

In "Political Meeting" A. M. Klein describes an orator addressing an anti-conscription rally in Quebec. The Orator, we are told, is "a country uncle with sunflower seeds in his pockets." The description of the sunflower seeds in the Orator's pockets is the most vivid physical detail in the poem. But it is more than just that. For anyone who knows "Political Meeting," the image of the sunflower seeds has the power to call up the complex mood of the poem, and, ...

[In recent discussions of Klein's work, his radical poems] have either been ignored or else dismissed as having no literary value. On the whole they have been considered as a regrettable and troubling episode in an otherwise virtuous literary life. (p. 31) My own view is that the radical poems are still fresh, interesting, and alive, not merely as biographical data but as literary works. Although I share many of the values which these poems assert, my interest is not based on a nostalgic hankering af...

"The poetry of Abraham Moses Klein springs from the roots of a consciousness where Hebrew and legal lore have become strangely and exotically intermingled with Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot," Leon Edel remarks. Klein's passion for English literature was second only to his love for Judaism, and in each the feeling was supported by a refined and extensive scholarship. His early work is thronged with Elizabethan locutions, some appropriate in that they fit in with the rhetorical Jewish tradi...