Tapestry for Designs: Judaic Illusions in The Second Scroll and in The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein by Solomon J. Spiro (review)

he has someone say of Uncle Melech, in The Second Scroll, that "he greatly loves the right word, but he loves righteousness more." LIONEL RUBINOFF Trent University TAPESTRY FOR DESIGNS: Judaic I/lusions in The Second Scroll and in The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein. Solomon J. Spiro. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1984. Pp. 380. Cloth $35.00. Tapestry for Designs is a seriously flawed book. Although it does contain some useful references and ideas, these do not go very far toward redeeming it from its failings of scholarship , critical insight, and style, and from the limitations of its pietism. Rabbi Spiro seems unaware that Miriam Waddington's edition of Klein's poetry, which he uses as the basis of the first half of his commentary, is often undependable, and more than once expends much zealous ingenuity on explicating words and phrases that are merely misprints, or errors reprinted from bad texts. He glosses "Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger" in the incorrect order in which Waddington prints it. When Waddington chooses to print the shorter, inferior version of "In re Solomon Warshawer," this is the one that Spiro glosses, in spite of the fact that the later and superior version (published by Smith in the 3rd edition of his Book of Canadian Poetry, 1957) being twice as long as the former, is doubly in need of commentary . Although Spiro's book is to appear this year, 1984 (I review it from t_ he uncorrected proofs, the book itself not being available by my deadline), he clearly knows nothing of Pollock's article, "Errors in The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein" (Canadian Poetry, Spring/Summer 1982); nor has he read, apparently, Caplan's biography of Klein, Like One that Dreamed (1982), to judge by the fact that he imagines Klein to have been born in Montreal, rather than Ratno. Many of Spiro's glosses are hopelessly vague, or even completely mistaken. When 166 he tells us, on the first page of his commentary, that according to "the biblical story," Vashti, refusing to appear before Ahasuerus, "is beheaded," he is simply wrong. When he refers, in his preface, to "The Ballad of the Dancing Bear" as "an imitation of an early English ballad" without citing an example, it is clear that he has no example in mind and, I think, with good reason: none exists. Moreover , too many of his not-altogether-inevitable interpretations are given with no source or reference, but simply such words as ''this means" or "this as interpreted as." Nor is the book free of the chief vice of glossators: commenting at length on points that require no comment, and omitting to comment on matters that demand interpretation . The lengthy poem "Legend of Lebanon" is dismissed in a few lines, despite its difficulties (why, for example, "the Courts of Solomon"?) while "Conjectures," a trivial catalogue of similes for falling snow, is bedecked with ponderous annotations, as for example when the phrase "feathers clipt from angel's wings," mentioned in passing, evokes the following gloss: angel's wings - In the visions of both Isaiah (6:2) and Ezekiel (1 :6) angels have wings. It is a sign of the limitations of Rabbi Spiro's critical insight that he can't distinguish between a biblical reference and a commonplace allusion to popular culture. He likes to adduce a learned source when a popular one is more likely, as also a Jewish source when a Christian one is more likely. The tone of his book remains throughout that of the village explainer or Sunday-school pedant, and its critical sensibility is usually on a level with the tone. In explaining the cultural context of "Four Sonnets: My Literati Friends in Restaurants," he offers the following observation : A sonnet satirizing the supercilious and cynical attitude of Jewish intellectuals of the thirties. They habitually gathered in certain restaurants to expatiate glibly on political and religious ideas. Spiro accepts uncritically Waddington's categorization of "radical poems" for much of Klein's poetry of the thirties, in spite of the discrediting of this category by Caplan Revue d'etudes canadiennes and Pollock, and its self-evident inadequacy. In speaking of part of "Out of the...