While the religious sources of A.M. Klein’s work have been acknowledged, his debt to Yiddish and its literature — from which he derived nourishment and inspiration all his life — has been ignored. Klein matured in a Jewish Montreal which was largely Yiddish-speaking and he knew well its prominent Yiddish writers and communal leaders, especially the poet J.I. Segal with whom he shared a nostalgia and love for the values and traditions of Eastern European "shtetl" life. In fact, Klein’s roots in Yiddish Montreal and his identification with Segal were a major source of inspiration in his attempt to synthesize Yiddish and English culture in a futile desire to arrest Jewish assimilation in North America. Unfortunately his sense of failure at being ignored by the Jewish public, on whose behalf he had attempted this synthesis, likely aggravated his growing alienation in his last years and contributed to his tragic silence after 1954.