BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Journey of a Man Caught Between Worlds : A BOOK THAT WAS LOST AND OTHER STORIES <i> by S. Y. Agnon</i> , edited by Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman, Schocken, $27.50, 436 pages

S.Y. Agnon, the late Israeli author whose short stories are collected in “A Book That Was Lost,” has been likened to the Hebrew counterpart of Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner and Borges. But the most illuminating comparison, I think, is to his fellow Nobelist, Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Agnon and Singer viewed the same landscape through the same magical but ironic eye: the dream time of shtetl life in Eastern Europe, the nightmare realities of dislocation and destruction in the mid-20th Century and the brave new world in which Jews found themselves when the fires of the Holocaust were banked and the task of nation building in Palestine began in earnest.

For example, Agnon seems to invoke the here and now in a story titled “On the Road,” where he describes a wandering Jew who finds himself in the company of a miraculous remnant of survivors amid the smoking ruins of a blasted European landscape. But as we linger among these ghostly men and women, we begin to suspect that the massacre that they survived may have taken place a few centuries ago.

At other moments, though, Agnon presents himself as an observer of contemporary society with a sharp sense of the politics of human relationships. “Hill of Sand,” for example, is the story of a failed love affair between two young people who have made their way to Palestine as pioneers but somehow can’t acknowledge or act upon their more intimate passions.

“New faces with new hopes,” Agnon writes, “and the same old problems.”

A crucial distinction between Agnon and Singer is the fact that Agnon wrote in Hebrew, the resurrected and reinvigorated language of Zionism, while Singer persisted in using Yiddish, the mother tongue of the European Diaspora. Indeed, Agnon’s reverence for language in general and Hebrew in particular is one of the subtexts of “A Book That Was Lost.”

“Agnon’s choice of Hebrew, after early experiments with Yiddish . . . links him with others of his generation who turned to Hebrew as a potent resource in the enterprise of national renewal,” explain Alan Mintz and Anne Golomb Hoffman, editors of the new anthology, in one of their useful explanatory notes.

“Like Joyce, Agnon saw himself as one whose life and art could shape new identities out of old traditions.”

The editors have assembled and annotated the stories in “A Book That Was Lost” according to their own biographical and critical agenda. They use Agnon’s work, rendered in graceful English by a variety of translators, to illustrate the author’s own journey from a tradition-bound backwater of Poland to the dynamic but doomed world of Jewish letters in Germany and, finally, to the land of Israel.

What emerges from the stories is an image of Agnon as a man caught between two worlds but not fully comfortable in either one. For example, the very first story in the collection--”the signature story,” as the editors put it--is “Agunot,” a stately fairy tale about a pair of star-crossed lovers who struggle to do all that is expected of them according to ritual and tradition but discover that the consequences of misplaced love can be catastrophic.

“Agunot,” the editors explain, is the Hebrew legal term for “a woman whose status in the community is indeterminate”--and it’s the word that Agnon, born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes, adapted as his own pen name. Thus, they suggest, Agnon was acknowledging his own ambivalence about his role as a chronicler of Jewish life in a time when the old world had been utterly destroyed and a new world was being fashioned out of “chaos and confusion.”

“While Agnon’s writing draws upon the riches of language and makes us feel keenly the centrality of Hebrew to a worldview centered on Scripture,” the editors explain, “the relationship of the writer to that universe involves an intricate combination of reverence and subversion, piety and irony.”

The touchstone of Agnon’s work, then, is language as a tool of creation and an instrument of redemption. The message is often spoken out loud, as in a story titled “The Sense of Smell,” in which the author sings of his “love of our language and affection for the holy,” but it is never entirely absent from the fabulously diverse stories collected in “A Book That Was Lost.”

“The entire alphabet is insufficient to encompass his wonders,” Agnon writes of a scribe named Rabbi Elimelech, a figure with whom Agnon deeply and persistently identifies.

“And I haven’t gathered here more than can be contained in one small drop of ink.”