Philosophically Jewish : THE ELEPHANT AND MY JEWISH PROBLEM Short Stories and Journals, 1957-1987 : <i> by Hugh Nissenson (Harper & Row</i> :<i> $18.95; 224 pp.)</i>

The title of this elegant retrospective may seem bizarre to the untrained ear, but aficionados will instantly recognize the Jewish joke, old as the Catskills.

Students of various nationalities are assigned to write an essay about elephants. The Englishman writes “Hunting the Elephant,” the Frenchman, “The Love Life of the Elephant,” and the Jew, predictably, produces “The Elephant and My Jewish Problem.” Hugh Nissenson may not be as ethnically self-absorbed as other Jewish writers--his excellent recent novel, “The Tree of Life,” deals with Ohio settlers and Indians in the early 19th Century--but the pieces collected here certainly testify to a career-long preoccupation with Jewish themes.

All but one have been previously published: the short stories in two books, “A Pile of Stones” and “In the Reign of Peace,” both well-received in their day but now out of print; and the journal entries in various magazines and in “Notes From the Frontier,” an account of the author’s sojourn in the 1960s on an Israeli kibbutz near the Lebanese border.

By presenting these writings anew, Nissenson plainly means for them to constitute variations on a theme: the parlous and paradoxical nature of Jewish existence.

The stories are divided in their location between Israel and the diaspora, which translates, for Nissenson, into a division between Jews with and without political and physical power. Faith sustains the powerless, yet cannot eradicate their suffering. In “The Groom on Zlota Street,” the protagonist earns a living by allowing local Poles to pull his beard. He retains the option of preserving his honor--but at the price of his income. In “Charity,” a destitute Hebrew teacher on New York’s Lower East Side cadges a meal from the family of a dying young mother with the promise that “charity saves from death.” The woman dies; it turns out the teacher had his own salvation in mind, not the mother’s.

When Nissenson’s Jews have power, it always has its price. In “The Well,” a progressive kibbutz endeavors to share its water with neighboring Bedouins, but the Bedouin spokesman calls the kibbutz leader “a dog of a Jew” and in the end, their encounter comes to blows. However noble their intentions, the Israelis cannot rule benignly.

Taken as a whole, Nissenson’s oeuvre suggests that the Jew must have faith and power both, yet cannot, historically, seem to abide the two simultaneously. Existentially speaking, the Jewish fate is thus one of permanent imperfection, and Jewish history a model for the human condition--putting Nissenson squarely in a literary tradition that begins with the Old Testament, which is after all the saga of imperfect patriarchs and kings whose foibles furnish a lesson for the lives of ordinary men.

Whereas philosophically the stories seem appropriate and correct, dramatically they too often fail to stir the blood. Nissenson’s way is cool and ironic, an imposition as it were of a genteel sensibility upon cultural material that begs to be treated more robustly. Humor is pretty much absent, a curious approach considering the centrality of laughter to the Jewish experience.

The journal entries on the whole are more memorable, invariably containing moments of serendipitous revelation. During the Eichmann trial, the widow of the founder of the Irgun, the militant Jewish underground that fought the British in pre-Independence Palestine, remarks that the trial reveals that the Jews really aren’t chosen: “If that were true we wouldn’t try Eichmann, we’d let him go.” “Victory,” a journal of the Six-Day War, brings home the fragility of Israel’s security and the matter-of-fact competence of its citizen-soldiers. It succeeds better than its companion piece, a fictionalization of the same events called “Going Up,” in conveying the bittersweet quality of Israel’s lightning triumph. By juxtaposing the two pieces, Nissenson intends to illustrate the blurry border between literature and life, but somehow the made-up version seems the less magical or remarkable.

“Exile” is a rather recent piece, again a journal, dealing with “yordim” (literally: “descenders”)--expatriate Israelis--living in Los Angeles. It caps the motif of the dubious nature of Jewish autonomy. “Nobody in his right mind wants to live only among Jews,” says a yored named Yoav. “Israel is the new Chelm”--the city of fools. Adds his friend Adi, regarding the Zionist dream: “The future never comes. I want to be happy now.”

As is to be hoped in any such collection, Nissenson’s work improves over the years, and the best piece of all may be the last, “The Pit,” his account of the 1987 trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. In its own quiet way it’s more emotionally powerful than the whole of Marcel Ophuls’ fascinating epic documentary on the subject, “Hotel Terminus,” because of the author’s focus on--and identification with--one Georgy Halpern, born in 1935, two years after Nissenson. Halpern was one of the 44 Jewish children sheltered at a farmhouse in Izieu, the now-famous village near Lyon, then betrayed to the Gestapo and deported by Barbie to Auschwitz, where Georgy was murdered at age 9. Nissenson locates the boy’s parents, now elderly, in Jerusalem. They had sent him to Izieu for safekeeping. “I feel guilty for his death,” says the father. “I’m ashamed to tell people how I lost my child.”

In Lyon, Nissenson talks with a Jesuit priest named Lucien Fraisse, who says: “The human condition hasn’t changed since Adam and Eve. The world awaits its Redeemer. Nothing about the war--not even the murder of children--shakes my faith.”

Writes Nissenson: “I said, ‘It cost me mine.’ ”