BOOK REVIEW : Fabulist’s Memoir Is a Dance of Submission and a Tale of Survival : FROM THE OLD MARKETPLACE <i> by Joseph Buloff</i> , Harvard University Press; $19.95, 335 pages

If the ground is hostile, dance. That way, your feet are in the air at least some of the time.

Such was the folk tradition of Eastern Europe’s Jews: the jokes, the fabulating, the playful way with the supernatural. The Messiah will come, but if he chooses to play tricks with us, meanwhile, why, we will play them with him. All these were a way of submitting to what had to be submitted to--the harsh poverty, encirclement and oppression that periodically visited ghetto and shtetl (small town)--while being free of it at the same time.

It is a rich tradition. At its best, it is authentic flight. Short of that, it can verge upon complacent and sentimental wing-beating. The best and the not-so-good coexist in the work of Marc Chagall, whose magic is sometimes a shade facile; an incantation that relaxes into decoration. They mingle in Joseph Buloff’s memoir of the Jewish community of Vilnius before World War I; published with Chagall’s “The Juggler” as an elbow-jogging cover illustration.

Buloff, one of the great performers in the Yiddish theater in America--and long before that, in Poland and Rumania--died in 1985. Over his life he compiled, rewrote and, I think, re-imagined the images of his childhood.

“From the Old Marketplace” is a fabulist’s memory. That is, it is the memory of a child who was a fabulist in order to exist. It remembers places, people and things that happened, to be sure; and it drifts through, remembering the magical possibilities of these things. Sometimes it makes uneasy reading; the book is only partly under control. It can slip into cloudy whimsy; it can stutter with the effort of someone trying to recapture a dream message, and coming up with a few disjointed phrases. It can be breath-taking.

Young Joseph lived in the poorest part of Vilnius, the Old Marketplace. Bright, volatile, curious, he was the Figaro of the Jewish stall-holders. He ran errands, hustled passers-by, and imagined himself as the boy prodigy of hatters and herring vendors; an Ariel of trade.

The Cossack soldiers, who bullied the market-dwellers at best, and terrified them at worst, were, to young Joseph, another occasion for dreaming. He befriended one of them, who gave him sunflower seeds to nibble on and let him play with his whip. When the Russo-Japanese war broke out, he tried to organize a boy gang to play fight-the-Japanese-and-defend-our-dear-Cossack games. Indignantly, the other market boys beat him up. Only later, during a pogrom, did he learn what a Cossack meant to a Jew.

But he fabled on. Benjamin, his father, went to America and, it was rumored, made a fortune there. He was greeted as a millionaire on his return; in fact, he had prospered moderately as a furrier. But the play of illusion enchanted him; he encouraged his son’s fantasies and inventions. Better to be a magician--even a fake--than a victim. And thus was Joseph nurtured in his role-playing.

He made friends with a Christian boy and, since he liked to travel, decided he wanted to go to Heaven. A Polish neighbor told him to stick to his own Jewish God; accordingly, he went to study with a rabbi. He was bored until he heard about the Golem (a robot-like creature of Jewish legend); he could see himself walking around the Marketplace, a child rabbi with a Golem of his own. Later, hearing about Paganini, he gave mock-violin performances using two sticks.

The family moved to a better neighborhood. One day, Joseph saw two Christian boys, dressed in the uniform of the posh Upper School, talking to a pretty girl leaning out of a window. They set upon him and tripped him up. He vowed revenge.

“If I couldn’t take the street away from the students, perhaps I could take the girl and the window away from the street.” He went back, spoke the three words of English he had learned, and captivated the girl who invited him up. He pretended to be an American.

He took a second revenge on the student bullies by getting himself into the Upper School, all but barred to Jews. He did it by dazzling an influential school official, not with his grades, which were mediocre, but with a firework display of tall stories and bombastic rhetoric.

Some of young Joseph’s exploits, real and imaginary, seem blown up and over-magicked. Sharp and poignant anecdotes alternate with those told in a fashion which substitutes for a boy’s intoxicated imaginings, an old man’s mystical recollection of them. The last part of the book, which tells of the wartime occupation by the Germans, and the subsequent civil war between Communists and right-wing Polish forces, makes a confused and unfocused narrative.

Memories of fabulation, like photographs of pictures, risk fuzziness and a sense of remove. But Buloff’s fabling Joseph comes through often enough, caught in his fantasies, to remind us how heavy the ground was that produced such a dancer.

Next: Judith Freeman reviews “The Land Was Ours: A Novel of the Great Plains” by Charles W. Bailey (HarperCollins).