A WORLD OF GRAND APARTMENTS, coffee mornings, concerts and theatre and religious debate; of artistic insurgency, bohemian love and political ferment; above all of home life, Sunday lunches and holiday celebrations, carries on while in the background an inexorable fate grows almost unnoticed. Dramatic irony stalks the varied, often charming members of a large bourgeois family, until events of the first half of the 20th century break in, splintering it into its communist, fascist, Jewish, Christian and other fragments. Yet this is a fate which, in the end, turns out to be less than total, as the kaleidoscope turns and a new cycle begins, promising at least partial return to old unities and modes of existence.