The Flood by Carol Ascher (The Crossing: $16.95; 191 pp.)

Surround yourself with rising waters: The flood will teach you how to swim.” Novelist Carol Ascher uses this line by poet Theodore Roethke to preface her troubling and provocative story of childhood’s end. The quotation provides a clue to much of what follows.

“The Flood” takes place in Topeka, Kan., in 1951, when the rising waters of the Kaw River threaten to destroy much of the town. For the 10-year-old narrator, Eva Hoffman, the devastation is more psychological than physical. The flood shatters all her illusions and alters her secure, predictable life completely. She must sink or swim in an adult world full of confusing contradictions and beset with racial and religious prejudices.

Eva is the daughter of cultured Viennese Jews who fled Hitler shortly before her birth. The Hoffmans live close to the Menninger Clinic where Dr. Hoffman is a psychiatrist. Eva is intensely aware that she and her family are misfits in the culturally barren and intolerant Midwestern town. Since her parents are non-practicing Jews, she is too ignorant of her heritage to be proud of it.

Eva and her sister Sara, both one generation removed from the horrors of Nazism, sit on the stairs and giggle at their parents’ “icky” friends Misha, Hans and Anna Mandelbaum, who visit regularly for evenings of chamber music and Butterkuchen. On the other hand, Eva is entranced by the easy informality of the Rogers family, red-neck neighbors who prefer soap opera to the Metropolitan Opera. She is bewildered by her parents’ unenthusiastic response to invitations to church suppers and revival meetings.

Although the flood always looms in the background, this is primarily a novel of characters, not plot. Ascher excels in her compassionate yet unflinchingly honest portrayal of Eva’s parents. Dr. Hoffman is a man permanently disillusioned by his exposure to religious persecution. The injustices perpetrated against the Jews in Hitler’s Europe have driven him into an abyss of cynical despair. His friend Mordecai quotes him as saying, “Even if there is a God I couldn’t pray to one who would allow such things.”

Music is Dr. Hoffman’s salvation. He cries openly while singing a Mahler Lied but is oblivious to Eva’s confusion over her religious identity. Eva is constantly thwarted in her struggle to please this sad and angry man. “Nothing about us seemed to give him any special meaning or joy,” she observes.

Mrs. Hoffman is also unable to provide the love her daughter craves. Like a Jew trying to act like a good German to avoid persecution, she struggles to win the friendship of her gentile neighbors in spite of their prejudice. In the face of cruel anti-Semitism (“Jews smell bad,” says one little girl), Mrs. Hoffman says, “Why can’t people understand we’re alle Menschen , all human beings?”

When the flood leaves the Willigers homeless, Mrs. Hoffman insists that the family of three move into Eva’s room. Eva is forced to leave her cherished retreat, where she daydreamed while counting the ribbons in the pink wallpaper, for a cramped attic cubbyhole.

Eva’s confusion over the ambiguities and contradictions of adult behavior intensifies when the flood reveals her parents’ subtle prejudice against Mrs. Johnson, their black maid. Although the Hoffmans willingly assist the bigoted Willigers, they “forget” to help Mrs. Johnson clean the mud out of her basement. They insist to the Willigers that segregation must end, but Dr. Hoffman refuses to support Brown’s stand against the Board of Education. As Mordecai explains sadly to Eva, “There are a lot of Jews who are as bigoted as anyone else.” Taking a tentative step into independence, Eva tries to befriend Mrs. Johnson and is bewildered when she too riles against integration because she believes her sister-in-law will lose her job as a teacher in a black school.

In the dramatic yet poignant finale, Eva decides that her own path lies somewhere between the misanthropic detachment of her father and her mother’s self-effacing altruism.

Like Marilyn Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” another richly evocative story of the awakening to adulthood, this novel demands slow and appreciative reading. Ascher makes an honest and successful effort to explore the complexities of prejudice. The plot contains no cheap melodramatic thrills. Instead, the seriousness of the theme will challenge young adult readers to think carefully about some thorny issues. As Eva’s mentor Mordecai puts it so well, “Many wise men have tried to understand evil and suffering and, although there are answers that satisfy some, the question still seems unanswerable, and we still have to live with the pain of what we see every day.” Ascher should be applauded for writing what critic and novelist John Gardner once called “moral fiction,” fiction that makes an honest effort to find out what promotes human fulfillment.