BOOK REVIEW : Growing Up in a Family of Dark Secrets : WINTER EYES, <i> by Lev Raphael</i> ; St. Martin’s Press, $18.95; 245 pages

“Every secret,” Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote, “struggles to reveal itself.”

In a sense, Singer’s epigram describes the essential quality of all storytelling, but it’s especially accurate in describing “Winter Eyes” by Lev Raphael, a book that bills itself as “A Novel About Secrets.”

Stefan, whom we meet as a young boy growing up in New York in the 1950s, is struggling to find his way out of a labyrinth of forbidden knowledge: Where does his father go when he suddenly disappears from the family apartment? What strange affliction sends his mother to the hospital in his father’s absence? And exactly what fate befell his mother’s sister, Eva, whose very name must not be spoken aloud?

We are given to understand that Stefan’s parents are Poles who renounced their homeland--”The Christ of Nations”--and their faith after surviving the horrors of the Second World War, but America turns out to be an uncomfortable sanctuary for them. It’s “vulgar,” as they put it, and no refuge at all from the long reach of memory.

“The War, Stefan thought, it was always coming in to mess things up,” the author writes. “Couldn’t they ever forget it?”

Stefan seeks solace in the company of his Uncle Sasha, a piano teacher, but he cannot escape the torment of the riddles that he sees but cannot solve. Even language is an enigma: Russian is the language of confidences--”The bad things were always in Russian”--and a single word in German is equivalent to cursing. Even a product with a “Made in Germany” label is taboo.

“Sasha’s embargo on German goods struck him as something different,” Raphael writes of Stefan, “something more personal than history.”

What comforts and sustains young Stefan is music, which he learns to use almost as a narcotic: “Mostly now Stefan had enough music in his head for when he didn’t have to think about something or listen,” the author writes. “This was what he called his ‘secret singing’ that was just there without trying.”

As Stefan grows into adolescence and then adulthood, he acquires his own supply of experiences and emotions that are too dangerous to speak out loud. When he indulges in a series of erotic encounters with a schoolmate named Louie, what troubles Stefan is less the nature of his emerging sexuality than the burden of yet another secret.

“This is the biggest secret he had ever had, and he guessed from Louie’s silence that in a way it even had to be a secret from themselves,” Stefan muses. “Something else not to talk about.”

Eventually, all of the secrets manage to reveal themselves, but some of them have been so insistently prefigured that we are more nearly relieved than shocked. And, after several scenes of intense homoerotic passion, Stefan’s confrontation with his own bisexuality is almost too pat. But we are left with the sense that Stefan is not yet free of the demons that have stalked him from earliest childhood.

“It was like a horror movie, with everyone huddled in a deserted farmhouse, hoping they could escape the creature but finding out that the creature had always been inside, disguised as one of them,” Stefan muses after his ailing father has blurted out the ultimate family secret. “Everything had been false from the beginning.”

At the risk of appearing to damn with faint praise, I must point out that “Winter Eyes” works so well precisely because it is scaled to intimate human dimensions. Raphael’s book resembles a piano sonata rather than a symphony, and--as the author writes of Stefan--it’s a piece that he “knew so well his fingers breathed the music.”

Nowadays, one hears a lot of glum talk among authors and editors about the death of “literary fiction” and “the mid-list book,” but “Winter Eyes” is a fine and encouraging example of how a book without blockbuster pretensions can find its publisher and, I hope, its readers.