Darkness and a Little Light

East German poet Bobrowski (1917-1965) wrote darkly beautiful, pensive stories reflecting his Jewish, German and Eastern European ancestry, his sense of displacement (he was interned in a Russian POW camp until 1949) and his yearning for a vanished way of life more rooted in nature and tradition. Several of these 12 deftly translated stories are suggestive, fragmentary sketches or anecdotes; some stitch together overheard conversations, memories and night thoughts, like the haunting title piece, which oscillates between affirmation and existential despair. Others resemble wish-fulfillment fairy tales; for example, ``Lithuanian Story,'' about a beggar who throws coins into a lake, hoping to drown a Tsarist general, or ``Mouse Feast,'' in which an elderly Jewish shopkeeper desperately asks the moon how to respond to the German invasion of his native Poland. The collection's strongest story, ``Boehlendorff,'' magnificently profiles fiery, erratic Baltic poet Kasimir Boehlendorff, charting his wanderings in revolutionary Europe between 1797 and 1825. The bard's prefigurement of a new secular order that is free from political oppression and religious superstition ends ironically, with his suicide. (Oct.)