Buried in the Starry Sky : TWILIGHT A Novel<i> by Elie Wiesel; translated by Marion Wiesel (Summit Books: $17.95; 198 pp., 64407-6) </i> : THE MAGIC WE DO HERE<i> by Lawrence Rudner (Houghton Mifflin: $16.95; 212 pp., 0-395-45034-9) </i>

Fiction about the Holocaust provokes problematic questions for author and reader alike: What is the appropriate balance between imagination and fact? How can a subject so enormous and profound be captured in a single work of art? Who has the right to touch a realm that is ineffable to some who actually experienced it? Is it irresponsible--or even immoral--to derive enjoyment and aesthetic fulfillment from the contemplation of genocide?

At the same time, the Holocaust represents a seemingly limitless challenge for anyone seeking to understand such ultimate issues as the relationship between human beings and God, the nature of good and evil, the purpose of life and the significance of death. “Twilight,” by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and “The Magic We Do Here,” by Lawrence Rudner, are two novels that, albeit in different ways, succeed in grappling with these central themes.

The premise of Wiesel’s latest novel, originally published in French, is simple enough: The survivor, Raphael Lipkin, now a university professor of mysticism living in New York, goes to a rural psychiatric hospital, ostensibly to study the relationship between prophecy and madness. In fact, he has undertaken the venture in search of a mysterious stranger who has been slandering his most beloved friend, a man who had disappeared from Raphael’s life years earlier.

There is, however, something odd about the Mountain Clinic: Most of the patients in this sanatorium are convinced that they are biblical figures, and their hallucinations constitute new versions of the original text. Thus, Adam begs God to destroy His blueprint fo1914726517Cain, who fantasizes that he has killed his brother, insists that his brother is still alive: “That way I can kill him over and over again,” he announces. Clearly, the author is rethinking biblical truth in light of recent history.

Not all the characters with whom Raphael interacts express biblical delusions, however, and these figures provide the link between the ancient past and modern history. Zelig, for instance, spends all his time staring at the sky above, refusing to speak. Eventually--by joining him in his solitary obsession--Raphael gains this silent man’s trust, and he learns Zelig’s holy purpose: to find the vanished bodies of Holocaust victims. “After all,” he says, “they couldn’t have been erased like a typographical error. Or could they?”

While Raphael is absorbing the teachings of his purported research subjects, he is simultaneously attempting to come to terms with his memories--of his family in the Galician town of Rovidok, of the ways in which he lost his parents and siblings, of his friendship with and subsequent separation from Pedro, the loving substitute father who brought him out of his war-ravaged homeland and helped him to start his life anew. He muses as well over the break-up of his marriage, which is still painful to him.

These reflective moments are the most tender segments of “Twilight,” for they bring to life the small moments that, by their very simplicity, characterize the beauty, heroism, and terrible sadness of the human condition. They also get at what appear to be Wiesel’s principal concerns in this novel: how, finally, to come to grips with the meaning of the Holocaust in his own life and how to reconcile the heroism of the victims, the viciousness of their persecutors, and some vision of God and Jewish history. Is the Bible obsolete? Is it madness to have faith in a divine spirit when confronted by cruelty that is, unfortunately, no longer incredible?

These are not new questions, and Wiesel’s answer comes about more by metaphor than by the usual techniques of conventional story-telling. One clue appears in Raphael’s final conversation at the sanatorium, as he is about to leave without having discovered who has been defaming his beloved Pedro, or why. In the garden of the Mountain Clinic, Raphael comes across no less than God Himself. After pouring out his anger and frustration, he comes to realize that imagination can create its own reality. Perhaps the madmen who believe that they are Adam, Cain, or even God are as sane as those who believe in the existence of their biblical originals. It may be that the world only exists insofar as we create it, Wiesel seems to be saying. But this is not cause for despair, for we have the capacity to imagine goodness, justice, even divine wisdom, and in doing so, we make it come to pass, just as Raphael is ultimately able to overcome his tendency to believe the stranger’s accusations of Pedro.

“Twilight” is not an entirely satisfying work. It may be too much for anyone, even a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Holocaust survivor, and moral authority, to expect himself to grapple with memory, madness, and the existence of God at one time, all in fewer than 200 pages. The reader looking for a straightforward narrative, or even a single message is likely to feel disappointed or confused by the intricacies of this complex book. The lover of poetry, however, will be well rewarded with the lyrical, elegiac, and epic qualities combined in one man’s unique vision.

If Wiesel’s novel has Olympian overtones, Rudner’s thrives on immediacy. The narrator of “The Magic We Do Here” asks the reader to indulge in a peculiar and, on the surface, playful fantasy. Imagine, he says, Chaim Turkow, a young man from Nowy Dwor who manages to endure almost the entire Holocaust experience right in his native Poland, without knowing anything about it. Imagine a blond, blue-eyed Jewish boy so longingly awaited by his father that his existence is deemed a miracle, a boy who starts out as a prodigy, becomes a mute and dull-witted creature, re-emerges as a brilliant artist, and, because of his unusual attributes, manages to survive in hiding. Imagine Chaim, the sole survivor of his entire family, learning to comfort children through the magic tricks he learns from a dwarf. Imagine that the dwarf keeps within himself thousands of names--the names of Jews whose deaths he himself has witnessed.

Unlike Wiesel, Rudner is not a Holocaust survivor, yet his beautiful novel focuses on a theme that is vitally important to survivors: What is the role of the one who has overcome catastrophe? His answer is, perhaps ironically, not so different from the one Wiesel offers, through Zelig, when the madman tells Raphael that he has successfully concluded his mission: The celestial vista is actually a giant, magnificent cemetery, the stars constituting the missing dead. What is more, he informs his apprehensive but fascinated pupil, among the heavenly figures is none other than Raphael himself.

At one point, Chaim, who is all alone, realizes that he has to say the kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer, for which the presence of 10 men is traditionally required. He uses a photograph of nine men to round out the number. The irony is that he does so in order to say kaddish for those very same men.

The survivor’s task, then, is to live and thereby to remember individuals who would otherwise disappear as if they had never existed at all. Whether through precise words, accurate drawings, or simply the attempt at imagining a single life, the work of memory has a paradoxical power. Its result is the merger of life and death: finding the dead, even within oneself, enlivens them, and this is a supreme weapon of humanity against inhumanity.