Nathan Englander came to wide public attention and considerable critical acclaim when his first collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published in l999. Perhaps he arrived at his distinctive brand of fabulism as a function of his Orthodox Jewish education, as it was filtered through the fiction-writing workshops he took at the University of Iowa; perhaps Englander’s narrative voice is more than the sum of the parts that went into its making. In any event, what resulted was a group of stories that caused critics to explore ways of linking his work to the short stories of writers such as Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges was followed by a serviceable novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, which explored the dark politics of Buenos Aries in l976. But as Englander’s latest short story collection makes clear, he is more comfortable — and more imaginatively powerful — when working on smaller canvases.

The eight stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank are divided among those set in Israel ( Sister Hills, Free Fruit for Young Widows), those set in America ( Peep Show, Camp Sundown), and one in which an observantly Jewish Israeli couple discuss the Holocaust with their secular American-Jewish counterparts ( What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank). No matter the setting, however, what makes the stories resonate long after their final paragraphs is Englander’s odd coupling of the morally serious and the deliciously comic.

Consider Peep Show, a story of 42nd Street in the XXX-rated days before it became squeaky clean. Allen Fein, a nondescript Manhattan lawyer, may find himself drawn to the promised pleasures of a peep show, but he is, on the surface, a creature of the suburbs where hs lives with his non-Jewish wife, Claire. Give such facts a gentle squeeze and the result is humor of the Englander sort: “When had he become a grown man [Fein wonders], on his way home to a loving wife, a pregnant wife, a beautiful blond Gentile wife, who laughed when he didn’t know how to work the Christmas lights , who bought a candle with a picture of Jesus on it when it came time for the memorial for his father (“They were out of the little white ones,” Claire had said. “Can’t you just turn Jesus toward the wall?”)

The story puts Fein through a moral workout, and the same thing is true for the other tales in this collection. Englander may wear his Jewishness lightly but it is always there — as a weapon or a shield, a riddling challenge or an ever-present “presence.” As a character in How We Avenged the Blums says: “It’s a delicate things being Jewish. . . . It’s a condition that aggravates the more mind you pay it.”

At their finest, Englandler’s stories take on large, important subjects. The collection’s title story reunites two women who have taken different paths since college: one married an Orthodox Jew and now lives an observant life in Israel; the other married a secular Jewish man and now lives a secular Jewish life in America. Their reunion, and vivid back-and-forth dialogue it provokes, provides sizable doses of Englandler’s humor and sharp-elbowed observations. As the title indicates, the conversation comes down to talking about Anne Frank and which of their Gentile friends could be trusted to hide their children, if necessary.

Sister Hills is even more ambitious, as it covers the wide seep of settlements on the West Bank through the eyes of Rena Cohen, who loses her husband and two sons during the various wars that comprise modern Israeli history. The story begins in the one-room shack that the Cohens call home, surrounded by unfriendly Arabs. As Rena mourns her dead and clings ever more tightly to a woman who may or may not be her daughter, we watch the hillside landscape change until it becomes a prized location for real estate developers.

We can easily tick off the names of writers whose first book dazzled and whose second book disappointed. Nathan Englander is a happy exception to this largely unforgiving rule: His second collection of short story more than fulfills the large promises of his first. What do we talk about when we talk about Englander? We talk about how he became a master storyteller.

Sanford Pinsker is a writer in Fort Lauderdale.