His old Kentucky home.

No Heroes A Memoir of Coming Home Chris Offutt Simon & Schuster, $24, 268 pp.

Lives there a transplanted Southerner who does not dream of going home a hero? Having betrayed the values of continuity and family by crossing state lines for adventures elsewhere, Southern expats long to make it right. Many uneasily shake off the past on their way to becoming something better, more worldly, or famous, but it's no good. Home is there, always, beckoning with guilt or promise. The soul that can resist the lure of going back both to make a difference and to atone for the original desertion is a lost soul indeed.

For Chris Offutt, the chance to teach writing at his alma mater in the hills of eastern Kentucky was the lure. He was spurred, he says, by the desire to "give back to the community ... to teach writing in a region where thirty percent of people were functionally illiterate." Besides, he craved the relief of being among his own kind. As he says in the prologue to this unusual memoir, going back to Kentucky meant that he no longer would have to bother about "preplanned responses to comments about wearing shoes, the movie Deliverance, indoor plumbing, and incest."

Making peace with the past is, of course, an elusive process. Again and again Offutt undergoes the reverse alchemy of home, which transforms you from the gold you think you've become to the lead you were before you left. Offutt is a seasoned traveler, an accomplished writer, and the father of two sons, but in the eyes of those he left twenty years earlier he is unchanged. On his way to the job interview at Morehead State, for example, he runs into the maintenance men with whom he worked in his student days. "`What I want to know,' Billy said, `is who told you they were hiring maintenance men to teach college?'" In the video store, he encounters Nine-Mile, who was a star athlete in high school and is now the father of seven children spanning twenty years. "His voice was casual, as if we'd seen each other last week instead of two decades ago." Yet their ability to connect is lopsided; Nine-Mile has no conception of Chris's world, reckoning that it must take Offutt about a month to write a book because "that's when they change the paperbacks at Wal-Mart."

Offutt finds unsettling reminders of his past even in his students. There is Sandra, who confesses that she's doesn't own a dictionary and has never been in a bookstore. Offutt eventually helps her transfer to another college. There is Eugene from Martin County, tattooed and pierced, who hates school, mistrusts teachers, and struggles unsuccessfully to break free of his world. His dropping out of school sends Offutt into a melancholic tailspin, for it confirms the persistence of the ghetto mentality: Achievement is betrayal.

Into the unfolding drama of his life back at home, Offutt introduces what seems to be an unrelated narrative: first-person accounts by his father- and mother-in-law, Arthur and Irene, of their years in Nazi concentration camps. In fact, the two story lines, alternating in a relentless pattern throughout the book, work together beautifully. All three narrators are survivors, of a sort. For Arthur and Irene, survival in the camps was random, luck that cannot be justified or explained. Arthur, for example, was in the half of the line that was not shot by the firing squad. But the lucky pay a terrible price: Arthur is tormented by his lack of heroism, proven by the fact that he is alive. He feels unrighteous because he did not stand up for an ideal. "Why did I passively endure?" he agonizes. Irene says bluntly, "I am not an angel. I did terrible things. I was lucky." In a different way, Offutt has escaped the self-degrading culture of the hills by leaving home. Illuminating and contrasting each other, these narratives form an extended meditation on the meaning of the past and the function of memory.

Stylistically, the narratives differ greatly. Chris's part of the book is rich in characterization, abundant in description, and full of detail. The reader can easily picture him as the eight-year-old boy who biked wildly along animal paths and creek beds with his friends, or as the longhaired, alienated college student with protest buttons on his jacket. He uses powerful images: "The afternoon sun leaned into the hills across the parking lot, surrounded by chain stores that manacled the land." And he is funny. Of a spontaneous car ride with his old friend Harley, now a recovering drunk, he says, "He was not a forty-five-year-old alcoholic on the mend, and I wasn't his neighbor who left and came home. We were two Haldeman boys on the loose. Anything might happen."

By contrast, Arthur's and Irene's stories, transcribed from their conversations with their son-in-law, are stark and terse. The horrifying content of their memories lies at odds with the matter-of-fact tone in which those memories are shared. The impression is that if the tellers were to let the lid off the emotions beneath the words, the power of the memories might kill them. We have Irene's shocking account of her mother's death: "My mother was killed before my eyes. On the street. The SS. By the pistol." Arthur tells of the loss of an eye in the lunch line at one camp: "We are standing and--pow--the end of the whip takes my eye. It came over the back of the head. The tip hit my eye. That's it. I was blind from then on."

In both narratives, style perfectly reveals intent. In returning home, Offutt comes face to face with his past. He is constantly exploring his old haunts, trying to reconcile who he was with who he's become, working it out in his mind. For Arthur, the past is dead, or should be. It is not to be spoken of. He is resolute in his refusal to visit his native Poland or to encounter any physical reminders of the horrors he has survived. As it is, the experience of sharing his memories with Chris leaves him feeling terribly exposed, and is devastating to his daughter. Having been betrayed by his past, he rejects it and looks fatalistically toward the future. Home, for Arthur, is an idea without meaning. It is no haven, no comfort-giving memory, but merely a place in the present "where I hang my head." Faced with the unspeakable difficulty of constructing a meaningful life as a survivor of Nazi atrocities, Arthur has chosen the only possible way forward: to leave the past behind. Some things cannot be reconciled.

In far less wrenching circumstances, his son-in-law comes to the same conclusion. By Christmas break he is discouraged by his failures, despairing of his ability to change things, and worried about his young son's adaptation to a less-than-ideal school system. (His wife wasn't wild about the area either, I'll bet.) Thanks to a call from his old writing teacher, he "turns tail" for the more congenial intellectual and social climes of the University of Iowa.

Here is the memoir's weakest point. The reader may feel, as I did, that the account of Offutt's going in and coming out is incomplete. Were there personal family reasons--scores to settle, peace to make--that led him homeward? (His own family scarcely bears mention, a mere chapter apiece on his mother and his father.) Or was it good story material? Was he really so blinded by idealism that he didn't think about the inferior schools he would be subjecting his kids to? And did the call from the former teacher really come out of the blue, or was it the result of a conversation or two over the preceding months as the "hillbilly of the soul" realized what a disaster the place was and began seeking a way out? Offutt's admission of failure is couched in charming prose, but its sincerity is suspect.

"No heroes," Arthur insists when he agrees to tell his son-in-law his story. "Heroes are not human." Of course there are heroes in this book, heroic in small, very human ways. Irene made dresses from burlap sacks so that people would look healthy. ("If not, to the clinic and you die.") Arthur looked after the abused mistress of his camp boss. There were the German women who stood up for Irene when she was on the brink of trouble for fashioning metallic Christmas ornaments in the factory line. There was the friend of Arthur's, Stella Goclow, who went to the camps to help Arthur's mother, and died there.

Kentucky's hill country, too, has its heroes. There was Mrs. Jayne, Offutt's first-grade teacher, who changed his life by teaching him to read. The librarian, Frankie Calvert, allowed him to circumvent the book limit by taking out books in the name of the family dog. There was Mr. Ellington, the seventh-grade history teacher, who taught his students to take pride in Kentucky history. Whether or not Chris Offutt is himself a hero of the Kentucky hills is another matter; his motive and commitment are sufficiently shrouded by the narrative as to leave the reader as ambivalent as the writer. "I want to stay home," Offutt says at the end of the book. "I want to leave."

Elizabeth Cahill is co-author, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare Alive!