NONFICTION - April 7, 1991

CHILDREN OF THE ROOJME by Elmaz Abinader (W.W. Norton: $24.95; 352 pp.) . Abinader, who teaches creative writing at the City University of New York, has written the history of three generations of her family, both in Lebanon and the United States. It is a lyrical reminiscence (the roojme is the stone terrace outside an ancestral home) filled with a startling amount of detail, thanks, in part, to her father’s willingness to set down his own recollections as well as translate his father’s diaries. Because of the rich resources she has to work with, the author manages to impart an emotional urgency to the tale: This is a graceful book about a family in exile, assimilated but always curious about home, about the ghosts who linger there.