DIE VERTREIBUNG AUS DER HOLLE. Robert Menasse. 492pp. Suhrkamp. 25.80euros. 3

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In German, the word Geschichte can mean both story and history. This ambiguity is subtly explored by the Austrian writer Robert Menasse in his novel Die Vertreibung aus der Holle (Exile from Hell). His moving account of the Jewish experience shows that the two meanings are inextricably linked.

Menasse narrates the life stories of two men whose fates are interwoven. Yet this is much more than a Bildungsroman. Menasse's novel is a cultural history, an exploration of the dark past of Europe and the persecution of the Jews. And in an age of genetics, when ancestral relationships have assumed a new deterministic reality, it is also the history of a family, one that implicitly includes even the author, Robert Menasse.

The novel begins with two extraordinary events that demand explanation: a funeral for a cat that has been crucified, and a school reunion in present-day Austria at which someone stands up and asks: "who were our teachers?" Viktor Abravanel, a forty-four-year-old historian, poses this awkward question to his former classmates, and answers it by detailing their teachers' contacts with the National Socialist Party. His revelations are greeted with uproar, and the headmaster storms out of the reunion followed by staff and students. Only one of his former friends remains, Hildegund. During the evening he explains why his question needed to be asked.

The other story concerns Manoel Soeira, who at the age of eight crucified a cat in the Portuguese village of Vila dos Comecos just days after the Inquisition arrived there in 1612. His name is, like the novel itself, multi-layered. He is called Manoel after the Portuguese king who persecuted the Jews; Mane is his nickname; but to his parents he is also Samuel, his secret Jewish name: "Manoel the assimilated one, Samuel the visionary, and Mane the naive one". Three names, three masks: Manoel Soeira's life dramatizes the problem of identity.

For history knows him as Samuel Manasseh ben Israel, a great Rabbi and teacher of Spinoza. And in a book rich in irony, we learn that the day after his school reunion Viktor is due to give a research paper in Amsterdam on the topic "Who was Spinoza's teacher?" In the resonances between these two lives -Viktor in post-Shoah Austria and Samuel beneath the shadow of the Inquisition -Menasse finds a powerful symbol for the Jewish experience. As children they share an ingrained "hatred of their ancestry" due to their parents' desire to be assimilated.

And yet Menasse shows it to be a fatal wish, leading to a profound inner confusion, "this enforced existential ambiguity". Throughout his life Viktor has wanted to be someone "who knew who he was, where he was and what he wanted". Likewise, Samuel does not feel truly free until his family flees Portugal and reaches the multi-ethnic "human zoo" of Amsterdam. There, under his real name, he studies and becomes a "dogmatist of freedom", a rabbi who teaches the "Wunderkind" Spinoza and marries Rachel Abravanel -Viktor's ancestor.

Ironically it is not Viktor's father but his Jesuit schoolteacher who tells him about the Abravanels, "one of the most important Jewish families". As he listens to the Jesuit's stories and sees the history of the Abravanel family in the blood-stained documents of the Inquisition, Viktor realizes that history is hell: "Hell -and the exile from hell." In this deeply personal novel, the child's view of the liminal existence endured by Jews in Christian Europe is especially moving -the confusion and anxiety arising from a sense of otherness that cannot yet be comprehended; and the feeling of homelessness, that aching absence which taints everything: "Why had his parents, his ancestors, done this to him: prevented him from belonging where their home was?" Menasse speaks powerfully with the voice of minorities and refugees throughout history. At one point Samuel despairs of ever shedding the mask of "outsider", let alone achieving "recognition of what he was". Is this "absolution" to be won through society or the world, he asks; or does it lie in his "own soul"? He can find no answer, except to assert his belief that world and soul are one -an anticipation, perhaps, of Spinoza's unified world view.

Robert Menasse does not claim to have the answer either. After all, this is a story and not a historical study. And in the best traditions of story-telling, he withholds the ironic twists in his two tales until the final pages. In the end, both Viktor's public denunciation of his former teachers and the funeral of the crucified cat expose the unreflective gullibility of bourgeois, goyish society. The terrible dilemma Viktor and Samuel must face is that they have wanted to enter this society since childhood; but they know from their own life experiences and from history that all it offers them are the torments of hell.