'The Second Scroll': A Modernist Saga of Israel's Creation - The Wall Street Journal

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Photo: David Gothard

In 1949, the same year that he won Canada’s highest literary award for poetry, A.M. (Abraham Moses) Klein undertook a fact-finding mission to the newly established state of Israel, to which refugees were heading from displaced-persons camps in Europe. The poet then recast his journey in a modernist novel loosely patterned on the Pentateuch’s Exodus story: “The Second Scroll” became a Canadian classic.

Klein adapted the idea of writing in the shadow of epic grandeur from James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” about which he was publishing a commentary. But whereas Joyce comically juxtaposed to Homer’s mighty heroes a trio of domestic Dubliners, Klein moved in the opposite direction, appropriating Psalm 126 to assert, joyously, “When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, I was like one that dreamed.” The resurrection of the Jews, their “leap from Existence back to Essence,” inspired him to create a high literary form commensurate with the transcendent importance of this event.