About Abraham Moses Klein
Abraham Moses Klein was one of Canada's greatest poets and a prominent figure in Jewish-Canadian culture. Abraham Moses Kleinwas the most important of the Anglo-Quebec Canadian modernists. He was born in the Ukraine in 1909, and died in Montreal in 1972. Moving to Canada as a child with his family, Klein studied at McGill University, before beginning a degree in law in French at the Université de Montréal. He became a successful lawyer, and speech writer for Samuel Bronfman, the owner of Seagrams and a powerful business figure of the time. Klein’s early collections of poems often displayed his political and social concerns, especially Hath Not A Jew (1940) and The Hitleriad (1944). A Zionist deeply concerned with Jewish issues, Klein was editor of The Canadian Jewish Chronicle for decades. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1948 for The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, perhaps his finest achievement. In 1951, he published The Second Scroll, his only novel. For the last decade and a half of his life Klein was plagued with mental illness and became something of a recluse. Since his death, Klein’s reputation has grown, especially as the scope of his linguistic and modernist inventiveness has been appreciated. Klein was indebted to Shakespeare, Joyce, and others, and welcomed the connections between Montreal and the wider European and British literary canon. His poetic language has recently been celebrated for its impressive hybridity (and bilingualism) of diction, especially by the poet-critics David Solway and Carmine Starnino. The long-running Quebec prize for best anglophone collection of the year is named after him.Browse all poems and texts published on Abraham Moses Klein
