Mark Helprin's originality is hard to explain, just as it is hard sometimes to understand. But perhaps understand is too gross or aggressive a word for "Ellis Island and Other Stories." Mr. Helprin's style is odd, mysteriously accented, as if he were a foreigner imperfectly acquainted with English. But then as we follow him, we begin to wonder whether the foreignness is not in things themselves, intrinsic to them. He writes like a translator, only it is not language he translates from one frame of reference to another, but people and circumstances. Nothing is familiar in his stories: he is interested only in the fabulous, the borderline between perception and hallucination, knowing and wishing. His characters exist in a state of sweet anxiety. (p. 164)

In "A Room of Frail Dancers," a weary Israeli army veteran returning from the front says that "fighting in the desert, he had finally...