A Rich Meditation on Old Age, First Love and Tragic Loss : THE PRINCE OF WEST END AVENUE b<i> y Alan Isler</i> ; Bridge Works $19.95, 256 pages

The year is 1978, and the residents of the Emma Lazarus retirement home are planning an ambitious in-house production of “Hamlet.”

They’re a spirited crew despite advancing age and encroaching infirmity, and although their theatrical backgrounds run a short gamut from nonexistent to sketchy, the drama society performs only the classics. Last year’s “Romeo and Juliet” was a triumph, even after Romeo fell after killing Tybalt and had to be carried off-stage on a stretcher. But as our narrator Otto Korner tells us, you have to make allowances.

This year, however, making allowances may not be quite enough. The man who was to have played Hamlet has just died and a substitute must be found at once. Still, the people who live at Emma Lazarus are experienced at dealing with adversity.

Several of the cast members fled Europe just before the war, while others were not so fortunate and barely escaped with their lives. To them, a dead Hamlet is merely a challenge. They’ve overcome far worse. Their star has departed for another stage, but the show will go on.

While the situation seems designed for comedy, resident Otto Korner is not only an extremely articulate observer but a man with an acute sense of irony. The result is a rich and complex novel; a meditation on age, love, loss and the enduring guilt felt by those who survived the European catastrophe.

Before the war, Korner was a promising poet and literary journalist, happily married and the father of a son. Like many others with powerful ties to their homeland, he was reluctant to leave, ignoring the pleadings of his wife until flight was no longer possible.

His tragic personal story is revealed only gradually, when long-suppressed memories are aroused by a new young physical therapist at the Emma Lazarus house, a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his first, lost love. Each encounter with Mandy Dattner opens another locked door into Korner’s past, reminding him of the dazzling Magda Damrosch and then, inevitably, of the family who perished in the Holocaust.

The fragments accumulate and slip into place, putting Korner in the foreground of the European artistic ferment between the wars. Introduced by the free-spirited Damrosch to the vibrant cafe life of Zurich before the First World War, Korner meets the avant-garde writers, artists and political figures of the era, encounters that continue to shape his view of the world. He treasures only one relic of his past--a letter from the great German poet Rilke praising Korner’s youthful efforts in verse.

The mysterious disappearance and subsequent recovery of that letter will thrust Korner still further into the present, making it possible for him to relinquish his chosen role of Ghost and take the part of Hamlet. As the reader discovers, the parallels between the cynical 83-year-old refugee and the young Prince of Denmark are inescapable.

Although the subtext of “The Prince of West End Avenue” is profound, the tone is kept buoyant by the interaction among the Emma Lazarus residents, whose intrigues, passions and arguments provide a counterpoint of levity.

You may forget you’re reading a serious novel after encountering the lusty and sardonic Benno Hamburger and the unregenerate Bolshevik nicknamed “the Red Dwarf.” After you’ve attended one of the impromptu philosophical seminars led by the relentlessly cerebral Hermione Perlmutter and watched as Tosca Dawidowicz transforms herself from a pudgy virago into a superb Ophelia, you’ll think for a moment that the author has intended only to entertain you with a cast of gifted, if inadvertent, comedians. The coffee hours in Goldstein’s Dairy Restaurant are hilarious; the rivalries and romances among the actors continuously diverting. Otto Korner’s thoughtful commentary, still cadenced with European formality, keeps the humor firmly under control.

As Korner tells us at the beginning of this supremely original book, his subject “is not amateur theatricals, it is art--or, more accurately, anti-art: in brief, dada.” An ideal metaphor for the insoluble riddles of the 20th Century.