Review
Reviewed Work(s): A. M. Klein: Selected Poems by Zailig Pollock, Seymour Mayne and
Usher Caplan
Review by: Michael Greenstein
Source: Shofar , FALL 1998, Vol. 17, No. 1, Special Issue: Studies in Jewish Geography
(FALL 1998), pp. 155-157
Published by: Purdue University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42942845
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Book Reviews 155
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Alvin Goldfarb
College of Fine Arts
Illinois State University
A. M. Klein: Selected Poems, edited by Zailig Pollock, Seymour Mayne, and Usher
Caplan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 197 pp. $40.00 (c); $19.95 (p).
You certainly can't tell this book by its cover: from the rooftop of some urban building
(presumably in Montreal) a statue of some feathered figure - part angel, part Indian -
overlooks the blank cityscape. Perhaps, after all, this uninviting cover does capture one
aspect of A. M. Klein's poetry.
The 84 poems collected in this volume, however, offer a fine selection of Klein's
achievement in their balance of his early and later poems, Jewish and French-Canadian
verse. It might seem unusual that three editors were required to select these poems, but
this committee of critic, poet, and biographer has chosen well. In addition, they
supplement their judicious selection with 35 pages of notes to assist the reader with
Klein's allusions, and a brief introduction highlighting his themes of community,
modernism, and dialectical sensibility. For more detailed explanatory notes the reader
should consult the Complete Poems.
The first poem, "Portraits of a Minyan," offers witty sketches of ten different types
of Jews, beginning with the Landlord whom the poet satirizes as a great scholar but
harsh capitalist. The young Klein borrows from T. S. Eliot, or perhaps anticipates him:
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156 SHOFAR Fall 1998 Vol. 17, No. 1
He is a learned man, adept
At softening the rigid.
Purblind, he scorns the rashi script,
His very nose is digit.
He justifies his point of view
With verses pedagogic;
His thumb is double-jointed through
Stressing a doubtful logic.
He quotes the commentaries, yea,
To Tau from Aleph, -
But none the less, his tenants pay,
Or meet the bailiff.
Balance and symmetry are hallmark
intimacy and distances through its crit
rigid and displace one sense with anot
nose which becomes a finger - a point
that "point of view" and reinforces t
joint referring both to the landlord's h
inside and outside the Minyan. In the
misguided directions and priorities, Tau
Klein's deeper, more sinister explorat
poetry.
Even in "Pintele Yid" Klein captures the paradoxical, dual nature of his subject and
his attitude to it:
Agnostic, he would never tire
To cauterize the orthodox;
But he is here, by paradox,
To say the Kaddish for his sire.
The next poem, "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens," demonstrates Klein's
energetic experimenting with different forms in the nine sections on Spinoza that range
from sonnet to prose. "From glass and dust of glass he brought to light, out of the pulver
and the polished lens, the prism and the flying mote; and hence the infinitesimal and
infinite." Poetic balance and symmetry are ever present in this phrasing of bifocal vision
that transforms microcosms and macrocosms. From these discoveries Klein turns to
rhetorical questions. "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 any wonder then, that Klein's duologue culminated in The Second Scroll ,
a new scripture in the book?
Klein's later poems become darker as he turns inward, abandoning the communal
"Portraits of a Minyan" for the solipsistic "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape." The poem
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Book Reviews 157
opens negatively
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to his French-C
"Autobiograph
where a Jewboy
poetic transform
the Jewboy ret
sobbed oriental note."
For variety, the editors include some of Klein's children's verse and his translations
of a few of Bialik's poems. Klein's "A Psalm Touching Genealogy" concludes with,
"And there look generations through my eyes." Thanks to these Selected Poems future
generations will be able to look through Klein's eyes and hear his voice.
Michael Greenstem
Independent scholar
Toronto
Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America, by Gerald Sorin.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 304 pp. $40.00 (c); $14.95 (p).
Tradition Transformed represents a substantial and challenging undertaking: the
synthesis into a single volume of the history of the Jewish people in America. Sorin
contours his analysis around both developments internal to the history of the Jewish
people in the United States and around the world, and key moments in the history of the
United States. By and large he succeeds in his efforts and has produced a highly
readable, engaging book.
The scholar of American Jewish history will find little or nothing that has not been
said before. In a way much that Sorin presents here is a distillation of the 1992 series,
The Jewish People in America, the five volumes produced by Johns Hopkins University
Press in conjunction with the American Jewish Historical Society. Sorin had already
established a reputation for himself with his particular volume in that series, and
Tradition Transformed does not depart from the themes articulated in those books, in
greater depth, or in Sorin's own particular one.
The generalist reader, which would include American historians who want to
understand something about American Jewish history but know little about the subject,
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