Creator Bio
A. M. Klein
1909–1972
Canadian poet and novelist Abraham Moses Klein was born in Ratno (now in Ukraine) and raised in the immigrant Jewish district of Montreal. He studied classics and political science at McGill University and law at the Université de Montréal. Klein published poetry and prose in Canadian and American periodicals as a student and practiced law until his retirement in 1956. He was active in the Canadian Jewish community as a speaker, writer, and educator, and he edited the weekly Canadian Jewish Chronicle from 1938 to 1955. He was a visiting lecturer in poetry at McGill University (1945–1948) and associated with the Preview circle of poets in Montreal. In the early 1950s, he suffered from depression and gradually withdrew from public life.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
Reflections on V-E Day
Not with surprising suddenness did it come; it did not come—as in the dark days we had hoped it would—as a miraculous flash on a radio, a startling announcement lifting us from the depths of despair…
Primary Source
And in That Drowning Instant
And in that drowning instant
as the water heightened over me
it suddenly did come to pass
my preterite eternity
the image of myself intent
on several freedoms
fading to
myself in yellowed Basle…
Primary Source
The Second Scroll
And then—it was after I had returned from Tiberias to Tel Aviv to attend a literary soirée—then the creative activity, archetypical, all-embracing, that hitherto I had sought in vain, at last…