January 10, 2008
A.M. Klein in The Forward
Ezra Glinter, a Montreal-based writer and an editor of The McGill Tribune, wrote a wonderful profile of A.M. Klein in this week’s Forward.
If you already know about Klein’s work, you will appreciate this piece. If not, you should read it anyway.
If you still think you can resist, I’ll hook you in with Glinter’s lede:
In a 1943 letter to his colleague A.J.M. Smith, Montreal poet A.M. Klein complained of critics’ tendency to identify him primarily as a Jewish poet.
“Why did they… have to go flaunting my circumcision?” he asked. “It’s an adolescent trick — this whimsical opening of another man’s fly.”
Despite his protestations, Klein is still largely remembered as a Jewish poet — and not without justification. As both a person and an artist, he was deeply in love with the heritage he received from his parents and from his teachers, a fact fittingly reflected in his nostalgic recollections of his childhood in the once heavily Jewish Montreal neighborhood surrounding Saint Lawrence Boulevard. His poetry, as he explained in a letter to Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger, dealt with cultural synthesis and the problem of expressing one culture in the language of another. And contrary to his complaints to Smith, he was critical of Jewish artists who disregarded their cultural identity. Klein accused these artists of having “nothing original to contribute.” After all, he reasoned, “one cannot create with another’s genitals.”
Hope no one ever accuses me of doing that.
In case you’re interested in reading more, the most definitive collection of Klein’s poetry can be found in “Selected Poems: A.M. Klein (Collected Works of A.M. Klein).”