Friday, January 11, 2008

A.M. Klein

http://www.forward.com/articles/12415/

For those of you who might not know Klein, this article is as good as any place to start. My reading of Klein, his poetry, editorials and novel "The Second Scroll" were absolutely formative and essential to my own writing, my literary sensibility, indeed, my sense of identity and world view. For me, Klein is a deeply religious (spiritual) writer as well as a political one. And that is what I most appreciate about him. Whereas writers these days seem to be specialists, pigeonholeable, narrow in so many respects, Klein is the opposite. A cultural polymath and multi-linguist, his work indicates a writer forever trying to mediate the tension between the religious impulse (the spiritual, the eternal) and the political impulse (the temporal, the earthly), between the deeply personal and the communal, the particular and the universal.

No comments: