British novelist/poet Feinstein, who tackled some curious aspects of Jewish identity in The Shadow Master (1979), now fashions a slight narrative collage to explore a knotty tangle of conflicts - ethnic, political, sexual - in the late-1930s marriage of two assimilated Austrian Jews. The first part of the story emerges from the 1938 Vienna diary of poet/professor Hans Wendler: he grumbles about the lack of romance in his marriage to physicist Inge, blaming it largely on her devotion to her career; he frets over his increasing nervousness in lecturing, which parallels the increasing drift of Vienna towards Nazification; and he glories in his new affair with adoring young Hilde, a shadowy Communist agent who suddenly departs for France. Then, six months later, Inge's diary continues the tale: she and Hans have fled from Vienna to Paris, where he resumes the Hilde affair - despite Inge's knowledge and anguish; she broods guiltily over having sent their young son to live with American relatives ("Why did I deny Hans the decent ordinary home he demanded for his son?"); but she and Hans do come closer together - after their path crosses that of fellow-refugee Walter Benjamin, with his philosophic blend of Marxism and Jewish mysticism. ("It is almost as if, a book-list, and a few holy names, and sacred texts, have led him to forgive me for my Jewish grandparents.") And finally, in 1983 Australia, the very old Inge tells her visiting grandson the last chapter of the story: the refugees' flight from Paris to the France/Spain border; the reported suicide of Walter Benjamin; and Hans' own, perhaps similar death - a fate preferable, it seems, to that of the permanent refugee. (The epilogue is a final Hans Wendler poem: "I am not prepared for white soot, cold ash,/or the red sands of Australia. Forget me,/Dido: The cruel cannot be blessed.") Fragmented and unsatisfying, with a dense cross-hatching of blurry events and implicit issues - but mildly intriguing reading for those especially interested in Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish identity, or the traumas of refugeedom. (Kirkus Reviews)