A.M. Klein’s “The Second Scroll”: A Conversation with Ruth R. Wisse

Prof. Ruth R. Wisse joined Jeffrey Saks, Agnon House’s Director of Research, to discuss A.M. Klein and his novel The Second Scroll (May 5, 2024). Wisse has recently been re-engaging with this author’s work and finds it uniquely relevant for our particular moment, calling it a novel that “tracks history that is in the process of becoming legend.” Our event took place on the evening of Yom HaShoah and discussed how Klein engages with the Holocaust and positions it as part of his description of the establishment and early years of the State of Israel and within the international Jewish consciousness.

A.M. Klein (1909-1972) was a Canadian journalist and poet called “the first contributor of authentic Jewish poetry to the English language.” His only published novel, The Second Scroll (Knopf, 1951), depicts a semi-autobiographical narrator who travels to the newly founded State of Israel seeking “a new revelation of God’s purpose in the world” and finds a revived Jewish people in the “leap from Existence back to Essence.”

Read excerpts of the The Second Scroll (available here).

Prof. Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, emerita, and Distinguished Senior Fellow at The Tikvah Fund. She is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities and the National Jewish Book Award, and the author, most recently, of No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton University Press), and a memoir, Free as a Jew.