In 1938, when Jakov Lind was an eleven-year-old schoolboy, the Nazis goose-stepped into his home city of Vienna, sending him fleeing to Holland and a lifetime of Diaspora. Something more than a Jew without a country, Lind became a displaced artist as well, without a sure tradition or even a language. He wrote at first in German; now he uses English…. He has variously conducted his literary experiments in short stories (Soul of Wood), novels (Landscape in Concrete), autobiography (Counting My Steps) and even scores of radio plays. Yet few contemporary writers have been so single-minded. During all his wanderings he has clung obsessively to the original question from that day when Vienna became "one big swastika." How does a witness register the madness of his times without going mad himself?…

Lind has evolved less an answer to lunacy than a technique for exposing it. In every work he...