Various Positions Read Free Page B

homonyms,
Lexicon of Hebrew Homonyms
, praised by the poet A.M. Klein. Rabbi Klein was something of a confrontational teacher, noted for his disputations.
    A disciple of Yitzhak Elchanan, a great rabbinic teacher, Rabbi Klein was born in Lithuania, and became the principal of a yeshiva in Kovno. He and his family escaped the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, fleeing first to England and then emigrating to Canada in 1923. He first stayed in Halifax, and then moved to Montreal, where he had been corresponding with Lyon Cohen about resettlement. A friendship with the Cohen family led to the marriage in 1927 of his daughter Masha and Lyon’s son Nathan.
    Rabbi Klein made lengthy visits to Atlanta, Georgia, to be with his other daughter Manya, who had married into the Alexander family of Georgia. He found the trips stressful because there were few Jews in the South to share life with, although the Alexander family retained its orthodox practices, to the point of having their black servants wear skullcaps. Their large ante-bellum mansion on Peachtree Street became an unusual expression of Conservative Jewish life in Atlanta. It waspresided over by Manya, who spoke English with a Russian accent highlighted by a southern drawl.
    Rabbi Klein finally settled in New York where he became part of the crowd of European Jewish intellectuals centered at
The Forward
, the leading Yiddish paper in America, with contributors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer. But grammatical and talmudic studies absorbed Rabbi Klein, and he spent most of his time in study at the synagogue or in the library. He often visited his daughter Masha in Montreal and came to live with the family for about a year in the early fifties. Young Cohen would often sit with the “rebbe” and study the Book of Isaiah. Already quite elderly, the rabbi would read a passage with Cohen, explain it in a combination of English and Yiddish, nod off, then suddenly awake and repeat himself. “He’d read it again with all the freshness of the first reading and he’d begin the explanation over again, so sometimes the whole evening would be spent on one or two lines,” Cohen recalled. “He swam in it so he could never leave it. He happened to be in a kind of confrontational, belligerent stance regarding the rabbinical vision.”
    Cohen sat and studied not because he was a devoted biblical scholar but “because I wanted the company of my grandfather. [And] I was interested in Isaiah for the poetry in English more than the poetry in Hebrew.” The Book of Isaiah, with its combination of poetry and prose, punishment and redemption, remained a lasting influence on Cohen’s work and forms one of several core texts for his literary and theological development. His reliance on images of fire for judgment and the metaphor of the path as the way to redemption derive from this central text. The prophetic tone of destruction in Isaiah, “the Lord is going to lay waste the earth / and devastate it” (24: 1), manifests itself repeatedly throughout Cohen’s work in personal and political terms. Isaiah also sets out an edict Cohen has followed: dispense with illusions, reject oppression, eliminate deceit.
    Rabbi Klein had a sharp, Talmudic mind, the kind that could put a pin through the pages of a book and know every letter that it touched, Cohen recalled. Even when elderly and living with Masha and her family during a second period in the late fifties, Rabbi Klein exhibited a powerful, although not always concentrated, knowledge. He knew that he had published books in the past, and that Cohen had also published a work:
Let Us Compare Mythologies
(1956). But occasionally, when therabbi met Cohen in the upstairs hall of the house, he would become confused and ask his grandson if
he
was the writer or not. When Cohen published the
Spice-Box of Earth
in 1961, he dedicated it to the memory of his grandfather and paternal grandmother. At the time of his death in Atlanta, Rabbi Klein was writing a