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From Amazon
The Second Scroll is almost unique in Canadian literature, a Zionist allegory in the form of an unorthodox novel, one that draws its form from the Pentateuch and the Talmudic tradition, incorporating prose fiction, poetry, and verse drama. It is A.M. Klein's one great statement of his political and social vision and is as distinct from the typical Canadian novel of Prairie hardship as the Hasidic men who stroll along Montreal's rue St-Viateur are from the farmers and loggers of rural Canada. In the five main chapters of The Second Scroll, Klein's narrator describes his search for his chimerical Uncle Melech, a Talmudic scholar whom the narrator has never met, but who has presided over his entire life. Uncle Melech is a Polish Jew and survivor of the Holocaust who takes an active role in helping diasporic Jews return to Israel. When the narrator is commissioned by his publisher to visit the new state for the purposes of preparing a book, he attempts to track Uncle Melech down and ends up travelling to Rome, Casablanca, and Israel itself, always just a few days behind his elusive relative. Uncle Melech's story is a transparent allegory of the physical, political, social, and spiritual travellings of postwar Judaism, and The Second Scroll is more successful as a manifesto than as a novel. Klein's use of poetic glosses to his text is interesting as a formal exercise, but his novel is lacking in life despite the meticulousness of its conception. His real legacy can be found in his Selected Poems, which is largely free of the contrivance of The Second Scroll--a book of great political and philosophical significance but, sadly, an aesthetic failure. --Jack Illingworth
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