A.M. Klein
The Second Scroll
New Canadian Library, $6.95

In the year following Israel's founding, a Montreal publisher asks a young local poet to travel through the fledgling country and return with "a volume of translations of the poems and songs of Israel's latest nest of singing birds." The poet, a stand-in for Klein, has a different journey in mind: He wants to find his Uncle Melech, who survived the Holocaust and is now presumed to be in the Holy Land.

Reminiscent of Nabokov and Joyce, this lyrical novel begins with five chapters that correspond with (and are named for) the five books of the Torah. The five sections that follow, meanwhile, take the form of scholarly glosses on the first five. Through his unusual structure and the precision of his language, Klein somehow manages to chronicle history's violent episodes while continually hitting notes of hope.