The Beauty of Warsaw : THE BEAUTIFUL MRS. SEIDENMAN by Andrzej Szczpiorski translated from the Polish <i> by Klara Glowczewska (Grove Press: $18.95; 194 pp.)</i>

The first chapter of this vibrant book will convince American readers that author and translator are perfectly matched talents. A passionately committed and supremely ironic writer, Szczpiorski has had the good fortune to see the nuances of his native language turned into lyrical and idiomatic English.

“The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman” is more than a collection of short fiction but not quite a traditional novel; an elegant amalgam of distinct and separate tales linked by a few recurrent characters and a common setting. Each story has a distinct plot, though some are mere vignettes and others almost novellas in themselves.

By the end of the book, every separate incident and personality has been thoroughly incorporated into a literary mural of life in Warsaw during World War II. Szczpiorski introduces us to aristocrats, students, artisans and soldiers; to mothers, widows, nuns and wives; to the Jews already sealed into the ghetto and the Gentiles living in uneasy limbo on its edges; every story illustrating how inextricably the various lives touch, clash and mesh. Often, we are introduced to a character before the war and follow that person for an entire lifetime.

There are accidental heroes and inadvertent villains; surprising and unexpected switches that lend the book its extraordinary originality. As in classical drama, the horrors take place off-stage, leaving the reader to devise his own graphics. Though Szczpiorski writes from a profoundly Catholic sensibility and an abiding patriotism, his characters never slide into the stereotypes common even to the finest war novels. Here the war is background, exaggerating the contradictions and paradoxes in human nature without subsuming them. These are chronicles of accommodation and adjustment rather than of transformation.

Szczpiorski begins with the story of an ordinary Polish tailor paying a call upon a distinguished judge. The vagaries of war have reversed the normal social order, inflating the value of well-tailored breeches and devaluing a university education and a noble name. Every few weeks, the judge sells his visitor another family heirloom, for which the tailor happily overpays “just so he could sit again on the threadbare little couch in this living room, with its odor of old objects and the dust from many books,” discussing military strategy with the judge as if they were old friends and colleagues instead of two men brought together by grim necessity.

Pawelek Kyrnski is 19 years old, and “already he understood well the difference between the sexes and was losing his faith in immortality.” Kyrnski will reappear several times in the course of the book; arguing with his brilliant but reckless Jewish friend Henio; alone with his youthful hopes and dreams; enacting his crucial role in the salvation of Mrs. Seidenman. Her beauty, which would be mere prettiness in ordinary times, becomes a matter of life and death during the war, provoking the reactions that give these stories their necessary cohesion.

She herself is not actually introduced until the third chapter, after having been denounced and imprisoned for masquerading as the widow of a Polish officer. By morning, the fair and winsome Mrs. Seidenman has been released, her life saved by a chain of fortunate encounters with Polish friends and neighbors who interceded because they believed her fiction. Spared by their efforts, she dedicates herself to preserving the scientific work of her late husband, the Jewish radiologist Seidenman. When we see her last, she’s an elderly exile living out her days in Paris; a survivor who gave others the opportunity to be heroic without being in any way remarkable herself. She is a catalyst, illustrating the random workings of fate.

Sister Weronika is a nun who once dreamed of becoming a missionary in Africa but who has settled instead for service in Warsaw, where her goal is “to bring to God all of earth’s children--the near and the far away, the white, the black, the yellow and those even more exotic. If there was any coldness in her heart, then it was only toward Jewish children, for it is one thing to have never come to know God, and something altogether different to have known and to have crucified him.” Yet despite her prejudices and misgivings, Sister Weronika saves scores of children from the Nazis. She drills them in new rituals and tirelessly rehearses them in their strange new identities, having convinced herself that God has merely changed the locus of her mission. Imperfect but splendid, Sister Weronika lingers in the mind long after a conventionally saintly figure would have faded.

Though the author has clearly attempted to present his Nazis as subtly as he portrays his Poles and Jews, evil has fewer guises than good. Despite a conscientious effort to explain the character of Stuckler, the son of a poor miller who becomes an officer in the SS, Szczpiorski is far more successful with his own countrymen.

Naturally idealistic but made cynical by a tormented history, the enduring spirit of Poland is revealed here in all its complexity by a writer whose love for his country is tempered by a profound understanding of its every strength and weakness.