Had it not been for this year abroad, and more importantly, for not randomly picking the module Jewish Canadian Writers on a whim, I would not have met Professor Mayne and he would not have introduced me to and mentored my through an academic exploration of A.M. Klein. Here is the A+, top-of-the-class paper I wrote for him.
‘Anointed, With Gasoline’: The Messiah in A.M. Klein’s 'The Second Scroll'
By Hannah Barr
A.M.
Klein’s celebrated novel, The Second
Scroll, is a multifaceted text. It is at once a quasi-autobiography of a
Jewish Canadian writer on his personal quest for understating in a
post-Holocaust world; an historical novel documenting the challenges and
triumphs of the foundation of the nation state of Israel; as well as an
allegorical tale of hope for universal Jewry against adversity and evil,
steeped in Judaeo-Christian theology. Prevalent in Klein’s novel is the concept
of the Messiah as both tangible saviour and metaphorical ideal. For Klein, The Second Scroll is an articulation of
his extraordinary experiences from his travels to Israel and through North
Africa, which had a profound effect on him with regards to Jewish identity as he
was ‘present at the rebirth of [the Jewish] people, their return to life.’[1]
Such a rebirth forms the basis for the two major embodiments of Messianic hope
within the novel: the character of Melech Davidson and the conceit of Israel as
Messiah. However, with Klein there is never an absence of caution or sense or
foreboding within the majority of his body of work; therefore, Klein’s Messiah
in The Second Scroll is not just
anointed, but ‘anointed, with gasoline.’[2]
It is this image of Messiahship one must keep in mind when exploring the Messianic
aspect of Klein’s The Second Scroll.
Told
from a first person perspective by an unnamed narrator, The Second Scroll is thus first and foremost concerned with the
elusive Uncle Melech Davidson, who is the reason for the narrator’s journeys
away from Canada. Klein’s characterisation makes perfectly clear his view of
who Uncle Melech is. In a letter to fellow writer, Leon Edel, in September
1951, Klein states that the narrator’s journey is a pursuit of Melech Davidson,
‘that is King, son of David; it is a Messianic pursuit.’[3]
Every time his name is mentioned, the fundamental Jewish credentials for a
Messiah are being emphasised. His connections with the biblical David and
kingship connect him with the Messianic prophecies seen in the Hebrew Bible
from the books of the prophets Isaiah and Micah, in particular. Whilst naming
his main character to so obviously allude to him as a Messianic figure, it is
Klein’s more subtle theological intricacies within Melech’s character which
really cement his identity as Messiah.
The
narrator’s pursuit of his fabled Uncle Melech is seemingly a futile one; as he
travels through Rome to Casablanca and on to Israel, he says in Deuteronomy,
the novel’s final chapter, ‘the feeling that I was missing [Uncle Melech] by an
arm’s length continually haunted me.’[4]
The implication here is of the immanence or, perhaps, omnipresence of the
Messiah, and suggests ‘the doctrine of the attributes of God according to which
philosophical “views” of God are possible but never precise.’[5]
This sense of the multiple attributes of God, as embodied by Melech, is
demonstrated within the novel with regards to a photograph of him. In Genesis,
the novel’s first chapter, the narrator, wanting to know more about his uncle
is met with rebuke: ‘I asked my mother one day whether she had a photograph of
Uncle Melech. “A photograph!” My mother was shocked. “Don’t you know that Jews
don’t make or permit themselves to be made into images?”’[6]
The strong statement of aniconism is Klein yet again sublimating divine
attributes into Melech’s character. However, when the subject of a photograph
of Melech reappears in the novel, it is yet again used by Klein as a way of
incorporating religious ideas of the divine into Melech’s character. In
Numbers, the narrator is finally able to have his childhood desire of seeing
his uncle’s face fulfilled, saying, ‘all my life I had waited for this picture,
and now at last I was to see him. Uncle Melech plain! She handed me the
snapshot. It showed a man standing in the midst of a group of barefooted boys.
But his face – Uncle Melech had again eluded me. It was a double, a multiple
exposure!’[7]
Melech is not king of one but king of all; he is ‘the Wandering Jew, the
Messiah, Moses, Christ – he had no one face, therefore the multiple exposure.’[8]
It
is Melech as every-Jew where his role as the Messiah reaches its zenith. In the
novel’s second chapter, Exodus, the narrator reads a letter from Melech which
talks about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. He writes, ‘I scan
the tattooed arms – the man before me bears the number 12165 – and wonder
whether it is gematria that there lies the secret of their engravure.’[9]
Gematria, the ‘cabalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures by
interchanging words, whose letters have the same numerical value’[10]
is used by Klein in this passage to explicitly articulate a Messianic hope for
post-Holocaust Jewry. 12165 in Hebrew letters means “He has come.” In Melech’s
letter, ‘the words help establish Melech as a personification of Jewry as a
whole; of the dead as well of those who survived.’[11]
Melech personifies the totality of Jewry’s recent history; ‘everything that
happens to a Messiah happens to him: he attacks materialism…he rises from the
grave; he is flogged; he is impersonated by a pseudo-Messiah; the pattern is
exemplified again and again.’[12]
Whilst
Melech is a Jewish Messiah, it is arguable that Klein uses imagery more akin to
Christ as Messiah in how he sometimes portrays Melech. To borrow imagery from
the Christian gospels, Melech is the suffering servant. By participating in
seemingly the whole of recent Jewish history, from Tsarist pogroms to Hitler’s
Final Solution, Melech thus personifies the whole of Jewry and is therefore
able to be characterised as its Messiah; this is not a case of a sinner saving
a sinner, but rather it is survivor rescuing survivor. His life story is
representative of a broader Jewish history; he ‘represents the entire Jewish
people because Jewry reasserted its strength at the moment when it seemed most
weak, at the darkest moment of its history: it rose from the grave at midnight.’[13]
Murdered in the final chapter, this is perhaps Melech’s crucifixion, his martyrdom.
However, his anointing with gasoline takes place in the promised land as ‘Klein’s
version of the book goes beyond the original and takes the people…across
Sambation into Zion.’[14]
Thus, it is out of the ashes of a martyr that Melech’s followers can rise.
Melech, in reality, is a plot device to personify Jewry’s journey up to the
conferring of statehood upon Israel. Melech is the novel’s first Messiah; an
intimate metaphor who opens up the way for who Klein feels is the real Messiah:
Israel.
The
narrator says of Israel upon completing his journey there, ‘one thing, however,
was certain: pulverized, etherealized Jewry had put on flesh again. It was our
version of the Incarnation.’[15]
For Klein, whose religiosity was, at times, inconsistent and more fused with
the politics of Labour Zionism, the foundation of the nation state of Israel in
1948 held a profound importance for him as he viewed Israel ‘in terms of
symbolic rebirth – as the home of a people almost exterminated.’[16]
Israel in The Second Scroll is Klein’s
eminently practical Messiah, as well as its most astutely theological: ‘Jewish
messianism is, fundamentally, earthly, and the Messiah is seen as “anointed”
political spiritual and moral liberator, not a divine being.’[17]
It is in this ‘realization of the Earthly Paradise of the new Jerusalem,’[18]
that the reader comes to understand Klein’s view of Messianic hope for Jewry.
Israel is a Messiah for universal Jewry because, in its totality, Jewry is not
united by geographic experiences, hence the need for land; but rather by a
land-based promise from the biblical age. Thus, Israel is much more than a place
for re-establishment of the Jewish people in a war-torn Europe, it is a
reconfirmation of the promise of Jewry as God’s chosen people.
As
Klein articulates in his novel, the founding of the nation state of Israel is a
tangible personification of Jewry’s existence, a corporeal place for the spirit
of Jewry to now reside: ‘Jewry could not wholly die…Israel in one single
saltation [leaps] from the marginalia of Europe back to the centre and body of
its past and future.’[19]
Israel’s future, however, bears the marks of its people’s history. This Israel
is not a saviour from persecution, but a Messiah concerned with salvific restoration;
‘the contemporary Messiah is the totality of Israel, the latter day elan vital of [the Jewish] people.’[20]
This distinction between saviour and restorer is crucial, and reveals in Klein
an implicit pessimism – perhaps, doubt might be more accurate – about Israel.
As Fischer expounds, ‘the ending in Klein’s story, like the ending in
Deuteronomy, tells of limited achievement; of success that is unalloyed; of
happiness that is mixed with regret…But in Klein’s story, as in the Bible,
there is also at the end a great surge of anticipation. There is conviction
that infinite good is within reach and that profess toward it is inevitable.’[21]
Klein cannot detach the new Israel from the Holocaust, the pogroms, the institutionalised
anti-Semitism; hence Israel as his Messiah is imbued with hope without
innocence. This promised land, this tangible Messiah, is, like Melech, anointed
with gasoline because it has to be a Messiah not only as a bringer of hope, but
more importantly, it has to be an empathetic Messiah to the people it is
saving. It is a Messiah that has come too late to save the six million and,
thus, must bear witness to that calamity. But it is still capable of salvation.
The
prominence of the Messiah in The Second
Scroll cannot be understated. Uncle Melech is, to put it crudely and with
no disrespect to Klein, a painting-by-numbers Messianic figure: he linked with
the Davidic line; synonymous with kingship; a political leader against persecution;
he is characterised by his immanence; and his ‘suspected everywhere and found
nowhere suggests the idea of God in search of man.’[22]
Furthermore, he is the perfect Messiah for post-Holocaust Jewry because he
suffered alongside his people. The image of him we are left with is further
confirmation of him as a Messianic figure: he is anointed. However, one cannot
underestimate the importance of the Melech ‘anointed, with gasoline.’[23]
Whilst being anointed by a flammable liquid suggests a Refiner’s fire conceit
or the anticipation of rising from the ashes, Klein could also be implying
something far more sinister. In anointing his Messianic figure with the
dangerous substance of gasoline, it is as though Klein sees the creation of the
nation state of Israel as almost a tainted baptism of Jewry. This is not a land
for people whose God has made them ‘whiter that snow’ (Psalm 51:7 NIV); it is
the land of the tattooed and injured. From being forced to wear an
incriminating Star of David, this image of anointing with gasoline is the
people of Israel’s new mark of their Jewry. It is restoration after utter devastation,
where wounds may heal but scars shall not fade. For Klein, Israel truly is the
practical Messiah, the land that brings salvation and political rescue to a
group of imprisoned and systematically persecuted and executed for centuries.
But in a world where six million Jews were murdered, any Messiah cannot just be
a figure of hope, he must also bear the marks of adversity, Klein articulated
the required Messiah perfectly, he must be ‘anointed, with gasoline.’[24]
Bibliography
Edel, L., ‘Marginal Keri and Textual Chetiv: The Mystic Novel of A.M. Klein’ in The Klein Symposium, Mayne, S., (ed.), (University of Ottawa Press,
1975).
Fischer, G., In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and Ethics in the Writings of A.M.
Klein, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975).
Hyman, R., Aught from Nought: A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll, (University of
Victoria Press, 1999).
Kattan, N., A.M. Klein: Poet and Prophet, (XYZ Publishing, 1994).
Klein, A.M., The Letters, (University of Toronto Press, 2011).
Klein, A.M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland and Stewart, 2009).
Ross, M., ‘Review of The Second Scroll’ in Critical Views on Canadian Writers: A.M.
Klein, Marshall, T., (ed.), (The Ryerson Press, 1970).
Spiro, S., Tapestry for Designs: Judaic Allusions in The Second Scroll an the
Collected Poems of A.M. Klein, (University of British Columbia Press, 1984).
[1]
Kattan, N., A.M. Klein: Poet and Prophet,
(XYZ Publishing, 1994), p.77.
[2]
Klein, A.M., The Second Scroll,
(McClelland and Stewart, 2009), p.90.
[3]
Klein, A.M., The Letters, (University
of Toronto Press, 2011), p.218.
[4] Klein,
A.M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland
and Stewart, 2009), p.73.
[5] Spiro,
S., Tapestry for Designs: Judaic
Allusions in The Second Scroll an the Collected Poems of A.M. Klein,
(University of British Columbia Press, 1984), p.187.
[6] Klein,
A.M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland
and Stewart, 2009), p.4.
[7] Ibid.
p.54.
[8] Klein,
A.M. as quoted in Edel, L., ‘Marginal Keri
and Textual Chetiv: The Mystic Novel
of A.M. Klein’ in The Klein Symposium,
Mayne, S., (ed.), (University of Ottawa Press, 1975), p.23.
[9] Klein,
A.M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland
and Stewart, 2009), p.17.
[10] Spiro,
S., Tapestry for Designs: Judaic
Allusions in The Second Scroll an the Collected Poems of A.M. Klein,
(University of British Columbia Press, 1984), p.27.
[11] Fischer,
G., In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and
Ethics in the Writings of A.M. Klein, (McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1975), p.175.
[12] Klein,
A.M., The Letters, (University of
Toronto Press, 2011), p.244.
[13] Fischer,
G., In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and
Ethics in the Writings of A.M. Klein, (McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1975), p.176.
[14] Hyman,
R., Aught from Nought: A.M. Klein’s The
Second Scroll, (University of Victoria Press, 1999), p.127.
[15] Klein,
A.M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland
and Stewart, 2009), p.67.
[16] Hyman,
R., Aught from Nought: A.M. Klein’s The
Second Scroll, (University of Victoria Press, 1999), p.142.
[17] Ibid.
p.138.
[18] Ross,
M., ‘Review of The Second Scroll’ in Critical Views on Canadian Writers: A.M.
Klein, Marshall, T., (ed.), (The Ryerson Press, 1970), p.90.
[19] Klein,
A.M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland
and Stewart, 2009), p.67.
[20] Klein,
A.M., The Letters, (University of
Toronto Press, 2011), p.225.
[21] Fischer,
G., In Search of Jerusalem: Religion and
Ethics in the Writings of A.M. Klein, (McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1975), p.195.
[22] Spiro,
S., Tapestry for Designs: Judaic
Allusions in The Second Scroll an the Collected Poems of A.M. Klein,
(University of British Columbia Press, 1984), p.187.
[23] Klein,
A.M., The Second Scroll, (McClelland
and Stewart, 2009), p.90.
[24] Ibid.
p.90.
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