“He’s trying to look like one of those Londoners from the City, but he looks very Jewish, just as he always has, and very German as well.”

So writes Grete Weil (1906-99), describing the unlikable New York Jew who suffers her scrutiny in the first of the seven allegorical tales that make up “Aftershocks” (David R. Godine/Verba Mundi, 192 pages, $16.95). Born in 1906, in Munich, Weil studied German literature and married a dramaturge, Edgar Weil. Edgar died in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1941, but Weil survived, in hiding, in Amsterdam. Recent English translations of Weil’s first novel, “The Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat” (1963), and her last, “The Bride Price” (1988), both dealing with the Holocaust, have been praised for their resonant use of symbolism.

The stories gathered in “Aftershocks” (first published in German in 1992) do not have the space to realize great symbolic depth; as a result, they become brittle allegories. “Guernica,” the collection’s first story, contrives a reunion between Weil, or a character based on Weil, and an old friend, Hans, an art historian of great breadth in pre-war Bavaria, a subtle art-lover with sound judgment. Faced with the prospect of Hitler’s victory, Hans claimed that he would not hesitate to flee: “After all,” he said, “there’s art in every country and there’s nothing else I need.”

Weil’s character still lives in Germany, and so, on a visit to New York, she proposes to meet Hans at the Museum of Modern Art, in front of Picasso’s “Guernica.” But Hans — now John — declares that he does not like the picture, or most of the other paintings in MoMA’s collection. His taste seems erratic — until Weil notices a pattern.

“There’s no art any more,” John declares to Weil, back in his well-appointed apartment, and Weil soon discloses that her old friend does not believe any art has been created since 1933. He is the walking embodiment of Theodor Adorno’s initial dictum, from 1949, that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz. As such, he is miserable, and his bitterness has made him pretentious. Not only do his clothes, a pinstripe suit and a homburg hat, reflect an awkward attempt at assimilation, but his very family — a Jewish wife from California and a “shapely” daughter who likes the “Rambo” movies — represent, to Weil, the nadir of American spiritual poverty.

Heavy-handed, but also provocative, “Guernica” equates emigration with cultural blindness. Hans-John has rejected his European past and therefore, Weil suggests, become a philistine. His soul has lost its suppleness.

To abjure Germany and the culture of the old country is to be a moral simpleton, Weil implies. She has no love for the aunt and uncle her protagonist visits in “The House in the Desert,” who escaped to Los Angeles via Cuba, embracing their new home with a fervor transparently delusional to Weil: They rhapsodize about canned fruit and a wonderful climate as the benefits of the New World, but all Weil can see is the insidious smog of L.A.

But this cross-cultural quibbling only serves to set up the larger argument. The aunt and uncle speak of “you know who,” meaning Hitler, and declare all living Germans to be “you-know-whats.” But they can’t bear direct discussion of the Holocaust. When Weil’s character mentions Auschwitz by name, her hosts begin to violently cough: “Shut up, shut up right now, you nasty person. Just look what you’ve done!”

Despite this wooden dialogue, Weil illuminates the insurmountable ironies of the emigrant’s situation. They do miss Bavaria — they specifically mention gentians, the beauty of squeaky Alpine snow, and the culinary pleasure of veal shanks, weisswursts, and liver dumpling soup — and they only socialize with “people from Munich.” Their desperate love for California could be a subject of great comic pathos. But in Weil’s hands, it is simply a mistake of taste, made on top of the fundamental mistake of emigration.

Her decisive animus against all who reject postwar Germany is made most clear in “Don’t Touch Me,” one of the shortest stories collected here. Esther, who unlike Weil did suffer direct experience of the camps, revisits Germany only reluctantly, at the urging of a friend who did not go to the camps and, after the war, decided to stay behind. But Esther is involved in a car accident, and when she wakes up at the hospital and hears German, she believes she is back in the camps. “‘Don’t touch me!'” she orders the doctors. In three days she dies, “of internal injuries that the doctors were unable to diagnose.” The message is clear: Those who survive suffer internally, but their self-righteous disavowal of Germany, or of European culture, only makes those injuries worse.

Few Jewish survivors of World War II have taken Weil’s position. (One, Walter Abish, born Viennese, even undertook to write his postwar dissection of the German soul, “How German Is It,” without ever having visited the country.) Unfortunately, Weil’s case for staying — for remaining a German — never really gets made in “Aftershocks.” Instead, she makes a negative case — frequently alluding to American racism, or the human sacrifice of the Toltecs — against the rest of the world.