The title of Henry Kreisel's best short story, "The Broken Globe," is an apt metaphor for the world--and worldview--of many of his fictional characters. For Kreisel's immigrant (and for those he leaves behind), the journey to the New World opens up fissures between European and North American experience. Looking across the Atlantic, vision is blurred by New World innocence and nostalgic delusion or by Old World dreams of freedom and fabled prosperity. The two worlds are further separated by war and the aftermath of the Holocaust. What is left is a broken globe: Kreisel's novels and many of his short stories document what he calls the "double experience" of the immigrant struggling to bridge (or widen) the temporal, spiritual, and psychological gulfs between European background and Canadian foreground. The immigrant must learn the contours of both landscapes; he can only fully realize his present by waking up to...