BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Exploring Territory Long Since Settled : SAFE IN AMERICA <i> by Marcie Hershman</i> ; HarperCollins; $24, 395 pages

Marcie Hershman’s first novel, “Tales of the Master Race,” was a chilling incursion into the German psyche at the height of Nazi power. The characters were ordinary people--hard-working, sincere and often well-meaning, qualities that magnified the effect of the individual stories.

One way or another, each individual segment showed how easily basic human decency could be subverted by a pervasive evil. By the end, readers were several steps closer to understanding events that still seem fundamentally incomprehensible.

“Safe in America” is essentially the obverse of that book, dealing with a Hungarian-Jewish family who immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio during the 1920s. Their story opens in 1993 as the patriarch is dying of heart failure, then moves back and forth through time to supply the history of the Eichenbaums from their earliest years in America to the present. The three-generation biography includes the Great Depression, World War II and Vietnam; a chronicle of crises culminating in the age of AIDS, although the largest amount of attention is concentrated upon the period surrounding America’s entry into World War II.

During the preceding years and throughout the war itself, the Eichenbaums were struggling to help various members of their European families escape to America, an attempt doomed to failure by our own government’s indifference to the plight of the refugees.

The tone of “Safe in America” is relatively uninflected and tranquil; the plot, a serviceable account of humdrum Midwestern life, choices that emphasize the ironic title.

To maintain the illusion of safety for their American-born children, Vera and Evan Eichenbaum carefully maintain an outward air of calm, hiding their concern for their relatives beneath a blanket of normalcy. Even so, their tension communicates itself to their children, who identify with the Hungarian cousins they know only through faded snapshots and vague allusions.

As adults, the children of the second generation will confront the harsh realities of the Vietnam War, emerging from that ordeal only to be personally affected by the AIDS epidemic, a Holocaust of an altogether different order. The inescapable point is that the best intentions, the most desperate measures, and the deepest love cannot provide protection from the overwhelming threats of 20th-Century life.

The elder Eichenbaums themselves are solid, affectionate and industrious, content with their modest success as merchants, happy when they can spend a social evening with neighbors. Their children, brought up in this hermetic, limited world, tend to relive their parents’ lives. As literary characters, they’re somewhat too realistic, arousing more sympathy than interest.

Vera and Evan’s children--Hankus, Teddy and their sister, Joy--are all good kids, but none of them seems to have much in the way of talent or ambition. Joy becomes a paler and less vigorous copy of her mother, marrying a man who barely appears in the book; Teddy turns into a resentful and eventually resigned farmer, while Hankus, the most spirited of the three, is an early casualty of World War II.

The Eichenbaums’ greatest genetic gift seems to be resilience in the face of adversity, a strength they will be forced to call upon many times between the beginning of “Safe In America” and its tragic contemporary end.

Recalling her mother’s hard life, Joy remembers that for her generation, “life was supposed to be different. That was even more clearly the case for her children. They were truly born to America, each an individual with a capital I, and weren’t supposed to get caught in a harsh impersonal net of epidemic proportions. The children, especially, were supposed to be secure.”

While “Tales of the Master Race” was a remarkable tour de force, a leap of the imagination into the alien territory of the Third Reich, “Safe in America” at first appears to be less of a gamble, an exploration of territory long since settled and familiar, but not nearly as safe as it looks.