Abraham Moses Klein (1909–1972)

Published in 1951 this slim beautifully written book is both a travelogue/voyage of discovery to the new state of Israel and a young Canadian Jews search for a messianic member of his family. It is steeped in the words of the Torah and the five chapters loosely follow the books of the Pentateuch, but this is not a book that preaches, it is a book that tries to place a modern Jewish man in a position to come to terms with the holocaust and the new zionist Israel. I did not find the religious terms and references in any way preventing me from enjoying what was at times a remarkable read.

In 1949 Klein travelled on behalf of the Canadian Jewish Congress to the new State of Israel and to Jewish refugee camps in Europe and North Africa and this inspired his novel. It is written in the first person and in the novel the speaker has been sent to Israel to find and translate the best of the new Israeli poetry, but he has a more important personal mission and that is to find his uncle Melech who the family fears has lost his faith. The books opening sentence:

"For many years my father - may he dwell in a bright Eden! - refused to permit in his presence even the mention of that person's name"

It is therefore a journey of reconciliation, a journey of reunion that is foregrounded with the jewish diaspora's return to the Holy Land. In Klein's case he spends only two weeks in Israel, but his journey is longer with stops in Southern Italy and Morocco in search of Uncle Melech. We learn that his uncle was a brilliant scholar of the Torah and became the go-to person for interpretation and clarification before the holocaust in what is now the Ukraine. The speaker discover's letters about his uncle that say that he became a communist: a Bolshevik, but just before his departure a package arrives containing a letter from Melech Davidson himself, which tells a horrifying story of his survival of a pogrom (Kamenets-Podolski massacre 1941) where he was denounced as a Jew and his lucky escape with a rumour that he fled to Southern Italy; to Bari where boats were setting out to take settlers to Israel. The speaker arrives in Italy where to his horror he finds that Davidson had been to the Vatican and had been talking with a Cardinal about Catholicism, from there the trail leads to Casablanca in Morocco where Davidson had found a post in the office of the administration of the Jewish community. As soon as the speaker arrives at the office and mentions the name of Melech Davidson he realises that his iconoclastic uncle had immediately stirred up trouble. Nobody really wanted to talk about it. The speaker is shocked by what he finds in Casablanca:

"there were, too, the classics of the French cuisine, to whose napoleonic strategy my palate had ever surrendered - but the gourmandizer's repelled me. They lived well these Moors, but too well: the thigh filled pantaloons that waddled along the street; the Negress with scarves, striped as with the lines of latitude, knotted about her large hips, gripping a sausage in her pinkish pink palm; the paunch proud merchant seating his buttock and belly on his chair - these spoke eloquently of past banquets, of many-coursed meals digested reposeful upon soft pillows and divans beneath the gauze of golden slumber, the brocade of the golden snore."

He visits the mellah (the Jewish quarter) where the inhabitants live in a squalor which he compares to Dante's Inferno, but is driven away by the flies and the stench that is everywhere. He leaves Morocco by aeroplane to Israel where the trail of his Uncle grows cold, but he visits places sacred to his family in the hope of picking up clues............

The story is packed into 90 pages, but there follows some poetry and excerpts from a letter from his uncle that details his visit to the Sistine chapel and how Michelangelo had shown a vision of the Pentateuch that could make reverence to Catholics and Jews; this is a fine piece of writing in itself.

The search for a missing person provides the narrative flow for the book which can be read on the level of a mystery travelogue, however there is much more to the book, not the least the sympathetic portrait of a Jewish family, the faith that holds them together and gives meaning to their lives and the vicissitudes of anti-Semitism that effects them all. Perhaps it would not be too much to suggest that the book should be required reading for people leaning towards intolerance that can so easily be stirred up into hatred. I found it a salutary experience and a five star read.… (altro)