Holocaust novels and memoirs are regularly stunning. The vexed discussion about the propriety of writing after Auschwitz, inaugurated by Theodor Adorno, does not always account for the beautiful work of survivors themselves. A book like Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” dares to be a good read, in all senses of the phrase. Levi himself references Jack London — whose naturalistic fictions make suffering a mimetic pleasure, just as Levi’s own book can make the incidents of Auschwitz engrossing. These are books that transport us to places no one should ever want to go. Now a new translation complicates the discussion: How to assimilate a Holocaust novel that foregrounds friendship and joy?

Fred Wander, who was born in Vienna in 1916, arrested in France in 1939, and liberated at Buchenwald in 1945, spent most of the rest of his life in East Germany, working as a travel writer. His specialties were France and Corsica. Wander only began to write about his time in the camps with “The Seventh Well” (W.W. Norton, 160 pages, $23.95) in 1970, and then only at the urging of writer friends.

If it is not too late to add a book to the shelf that holds Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Art Speigelman, “The Seventh Well,” translated by Michael Hoffman, will go there. It is as complete and affecting a tale as the others, and it contributes something new to this canon: bonhomie. After Wander, who died in 2006, returned to Vienna for his last years, he published a memoir, as yet untranslated, called “The Good Life, or Remaining Cheerful in the Midst of Horror,” a 400-page book that dispatches the camps before page 100.

In “The Seventh Well,” his earlier book, Wander already exhibits that kind of sunny resilience. Though he fully communicates the scope of his tribulations, Wander typically looks on the bright side of things:

At night, Block 16 trembled, snorted, simmered. The prisoners slept a light, barbarous sleep. But it would be a lie to say there were no little joys in Block 16. Curiosity, wonderment, thirst for knowledge.

Written after “Survival in Auschwitz,” after “Night,” Wander’s account belongs to a second wave. He never takes the posture of a revisionist, but he is clearly free of the first burden of Holocaust literature — to express tragedy indelibly.

Where other authors begin their stories prior to deportation, and dramatize the dawning horror of initiation into the camps, Wander jumps around, beginning in media res, with a vivacious portrait of Mendel Teichmann, a Yiddish storyteller Wander knew in 1944, at the Hirschberg camp near Buchenwald. Wander asks Teichmann how to tell stories — and this book is the result of that lesson.

Wander was an autodidact — an urchin in Vienna and then a vagrant in France — and in the camps he seems to have been always on the lookout for teachers.

He has an enthusiastic capacity for wonderment. He looks up and memorizes the weather with a painterly eye; he defines the survival of the soul as the ability to notice “the noble expression on the face of a dead man, or the beauty of a crystal of ice.” He listens to a dying prisoner’s nocturnal outburst of “Turandot,” a ghostly performance: “It was like poison, like a drug, it drove the blood into our hearts and choked us. A glimpse of paradise.”

This kind of thing might not have impressed Levi, who could not parse the “interminable Yiddish rhapsody” of the storyteller in his own block: His great achievement was to put his overwhelmingly raw experiences into a kind of perspective, one that was world-historical, but also personal, and also national. Levi described himself as coming from “the other side of the Alps,” and he reacted to almost everyone in the camp — including many non-Italian prisoners — with a skepticism that was deeply human but not overly sociable. He was Kafkaesque.

Wander, by contrast, is preoccupied with his friends. On the second page of his second chapter, he lets a Dutch prisoner named de Groot talk, and de Groot almost completely supplants the preceding narrative with an image of prewar Amsterdam:

We would drink a cognac at Heck’s, before going on to a little restaurant known to insiders, behind the Portuguese synagogue, where people dined on Russian-Jewish, Polish or Moorish specialities in hat and slippers, among humming samovars in candlelight.

This is a Holocaust novel that celebrates European Jewry as much as it laments its fate. Wander devotes a long chapter to Tadeusz Moll, an intensely mystical boy he tries to protect, but who is ultimately hanged.

There is Pechmann, another boy, who can play the blues with a wooden board and his own pinched nose — an improvised saxophone. There are many others: We admire Wander for his friends, and if his book seems more romantic than Levi’s it might be because Wander, if it can be said, had a better time, by whatever infinitesimal margin was possible.

“The Seventh Well” ends with Joschko, a small boy in charge of his six or seven younger brothers. Many Holocaust narratives, including Wiesel’s and Levi’s, emphasize the degradation of humanity.

This is what Wander writes of Joschko: “Joschko’s expression mirrored the cunning of a fox, the coolness of a cat, the deadly earnest of a wolf.” The common Holocaust trope grieves to see a suffering human turn animal. But Wander, in his characteristic way, finds much to like in this animal face; to him it expresses “his grim determination to get him through — does that not express all the greatness and dignity of the human species?”

blytal@nysun.com