Baggage From Another Life, Another Land : THE INNER GARDEN: Stories<i> by Sam Eisenstein (Sun & Moon: $15.95; 248 pp.) </i>

The American short story has made a comeback. It seems unlikely to regain quite the prestige it enjoyed in its Golden Age, the ‘20s and ‘30s, but things have been looking up for a while. A few years ago, getting a collection of short stories published usually meant either writing a reasonably successful novel first, or living and working within the boundaries of the small literary magazines whose readers are largely other writers or creative-writing students and their teachers. This collection marks Sam Eisenstein’s first foray out of that world, but he has been writing for 30 years or more. That shows too: He is a careful craftsman who can both shape an English sentence and structure a tale.

Like many practitioners of the short-story form, he also has a rather limited range, a small piece of emotional and psychological turf that he tills assiduously. Eisenstein’s world is that of the culturally displaced--the European Jew in the United States, an American academic in Japan, a German driven by his parents’ guilt to an Israeli kibbutz, an American professor obsessed with the Holocaust, only to discover that it has its own underside.

It is not surprising, then, that the vision that illuminates these stories is a disjointed one. Reading Eisenstein is like looking through the split-vision view-finder in a camera that is slightly out of focus. Recollected or imagined, the baggage of another life, another land, is always present, and always it acts as an impediment to seeing clearly in the here-and-now.

At its worst, such a state of mind brings with it the very disasters it is trying to escape: The German penitent accidentally kills a Jewish child; the professor’s fascination with the Holocaust drives a colleague’s mother to attempt suicide. At its best, as in “Hear Anything From Bakersfield?” the vast psychological distances between the protagonist and his immigrant father do help him build a bridge, however fragile, between himself and his teen-age daughter.

The norm, as Eisenstein is well aware, is perpetual self-deception and self-indulgence, which perhaps explains why he is strongest when he deals with the tawdry world of the failed intellectual. His universe is peopled with re-entry students, with teachers who never made it out of the academic minor leagues, with the likes of a 50-ish musician, the conductor of a “semi-professional symphony orchestra.” Eisenstein understands them all and does not romanticize them. Indeed, he can be deliciously satiric, as when an expatriate choreographer in a provincial German ballet company complains about the inability of his critics to appreciate what he considers a “neat touch”: having the head of John the Baptist brought in on a Volkswagen hubcap.

This is not an attractive milieu, and occasionally Eisenstein tries to escape into psychological allegory: The title story revives a favorite figure of the ‘60s, the unicorn. Undoubtedly, there are readers who still enjoy that mode: Perhaps there are even those who understand it. But his strong suit remains the dissociative realism of the interior monologue, and there is much to admire, and learn from, when he writes in that vein.