Fiction: The Argentinian film director and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky has been described by Susan Sontag as "a late Borgesian", while his compatriot, Alberto Manguel, cosmopolitan as ever, compares Cozarinsky to Joseph Roth and Julien Green.
Some of the stories in this collection have brilliant and gruesome twists in the tail, Edgar Allan Poe-like, while others are more fragmentary. But they all manage the rare feat of being both intellectually stimulating and warmly compassionate, contemplating the individual caught up in history.
The collection moves smoothly between Europe and Argentina, the present and the past. It is bracketed, appropriately, by two transatlantic boats: the emigrant ship that carried the narrator's great-grandfather from Odessa to Argentina, and the steamship, Nea Hellas, that sailed from Lisbon for New York on October 3rd 1940 with a passenger-list that included Heinrich Mann and Alma Mahler alongside the narrator's grandparents.
Both stories turn on identity. Young Daniel is sailing for the New World, where a Jew could hope to own a piece of land. Five days before leaving Kiev he has married Rifka Bronfman, but she is too afraid to travel with him.
Daniel tells his story to a high-spirited young milliner's assistant on the quayside. She is a shikse who hates her lowly job and fears her Jewish employers. In a flash of inspiration, she proposes taking Rifka Bronfman's place, and becomes the mother of 10 Argentinians.
Her origins are a closely guarded family secret, which is revealed to the narrator 110 years later as he lies in a Paris hospital, possibly terminally ill. He wonders what fate awaited the real Rifka Bronfman, who stayed in the Ukraine, and would have been 60 at the time of the Babi Yar massacres.
'Émigré Hotel' is the longest story. The narrator's American grandmother met two young German men fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and joined them in Lisbon in 1940 to help one of them escape. Did she marry Theo Felder, as had always been assumed, or had Theo in fact transferred his identity to his best friend, the stateless Jew, Franz Mühle?
In this story the narrator remarks that his present-day researches into 1940s Lisbon bring on a strange sensation that he can only define as "cultural nausea".
If the same dizzying feeling could be described in positive terms - "cultural exhilaration" maybe - it would apply to the pleasure to be had from this superb collection.
This is marred only by Harvill's failure to ensure that the letter "i" appears beneath its accent: not a single one makes it into the text, leaving the reader to work out, for example, that r'o means río.
• Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic