The content of Badenheim 1939 is disturbing, and so is its form. It is a fable—but only just. The protagonists are not horses, or pigs, or denizens of other times and planets, or even Everyman. They really are Jews, and under its banal all-purpose name Badenheim is as real as Kafka's unnamed Prague…. Some of the characters are nameless: the conductor, the headwaiter, the schoolgirl. The heart sinks at this, but there is no need to worry: the chill hand of allegory lies very lightly. The characters with names are no less and no more symbolical than the ones without: each represents a stage in life, a profession, a status, and an attitude—or in some cases, like the schoolgirl's, the lack of an attitude—toward the sinister events of the story. By spreading the narrative fairly evenly among them the author makes it impossible for the reader...