Klein's only novel was written after his pilgrimage to the newly founded nation of Israel in 1949.

It concerns the quest for meaning in the post-Holocaust world, as an unnamed narrator, a Montreal journalist, editor, poet and Zionist, who traveled to the State of Israel soon after its founding, searches for his long-lost uncle, Melech Davidson, a Holocaust survivor, in post-war Italy, Morocco, and Israel.

The novel incorporates modes from poetry, drama and prayer, and contains elements of metafiction.

The novel's protagonist travels to Israel, seeking "a new revelation of God’s purpose in the world," the "second scroll” of the title, and finds not a new revelation, but a new people being created: "In the streets, in the shops, everywhere about me I had looked but had not seen.

"[2] According to Cynthia Ozick, The Second Scroll tells of a reborn Israel in language that is “Influenced yet liberated by Joyce, forged in the laboratory of the English language as it exerts all its fathomless force, immersed simultaneously in Bible, Hebrew, Jerusalem and 20th-century history, this prophetically intricate work is the antithesis of what we have come to expect of the so-called — and largely secular — Jewish-American novel.