ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This Passover story is by Abraham Moses Klein, who was one of Canada’s most celebrated Jewish writers. Klein was born in Ukraine in 1909, and his family moved to Montreal three or four years later. He was raised in an Orthodox household, and originally thought of becoming a rabbi, but later changed his mind.
As an undergraduate he studied political science, classics and economics at McGill University, and then law at the Université de Montréal. He began publishing poetry while he was at McGill, and continued writing while practicing law. He wrote poetry, essays, short stories and novels, which were published in Canada and the United States. He was an ardent zionist and an outspoken critic of Nazism in the 30s and 40s. He was an important member of the Jewish community in Montreal, and most of his writings are on Jewish themes. Klein died in Montreal in 1972.
This story, Prophet in Our Midst: A Story for Passover is taken from The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, edited by Ilan Stavans, and published by Oxford University Press in 1998.
