In a conversation about her short story “To Be a Man”, the American writer Nicole Krauss was asked about the “thin line” that marks the relationship between her male and female characters, namely “the promise of tenderness versus the threat of violence”. Krauss answered: “I’ve been drawn to many thin lines in my work.” In her 2017 novel Forest Dark, the thin line was between one kind of life and another; the protagonist suddenly gives up his job and all his possessions to move to Israel. In Great House, published in 2010 and a finalist for the National Book award, lives are connected across continents and through catastrophic events by a wooden desk, and in Krauss’s preceding novel, The History of Love, people living through different eras in Poland, Chile and the US are linked through a book and through the tenuous bonds of human affection.

To Be a Man is full of thin lines. There’s the thin line that connects one human being to another, the thin line between being the rebellious girl and becoming a victim, between what religion offers and how it constrains. There is also the line that connects the past to the present. “We were European Jews, even in America, which is to say that catastrophic things had happened and might happen again,” declares a character on the first page. The same could be said of many of the protagonists in the 10 stories. Each lives under the weight of history, noted by Krauss sometimes almost in passing, as if to show that the history we are born with remains indelibly part of who we become.

In the opening story, “Switzerland”, Soraya, a girl with whom the narrator had shared a bedroom during a school year abroad, has gone missing. The girls think Soraya has run off with an older man, but the father’s pain and fear for his daughter’s fate is also rooted in what he has learned of the world. In “Zusya on the Roof”, an elderly man carries away his newborn grandson moments before the child’s circumcision ceremony: “Somewhere in the world there must be children born without precedent – the idea of it sent a shiver of awe down his spine.”

Few, if any, of Krauss’s characters are born “without precedent”, but they are sometimes forced to revise their inheritance. In the beautiful and elegiac “I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake”, a New Yorker inherits her father’s Tel Aviv apartment. She has known of its existence, but never visited, and comes to a realisation the moment she enters: “It was as if I was looking at my father’s life upside down: this was his real home, and the apartment I had grown up in was merely the place he had stayed in when away from here.” Along with the apartment and all his belongings, she also inherits a friend of her father’s, who lets himself in with his own key and whose presence she at first resents. Later, she comes to view him with compassion, realising that he may have lost a daughter just as she has lost a father, and that now they have found each other.

In “End of Days”, Noa feels similarly betrayed by her parents, who have decided to end their long marriage without rancour. Each has left the country, landing Noa with the task of delivering the paperwork undoing their Orthodox wedding – performed merely to placate an older relative. Meanwhile the hills surrounding the unnamed city, which may be Los Angeles, are ablaze; everything is suddenly unfamiliar. As well as the divorce decree, Noa must deliver a bouquet of flowers to a bride who insists on continuing with her wedding day amid the fires, juxtaposing the end of one union with the start of another.

Thin lines connect the characters across the world, from the US to Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Israel. One of the most unsettling pieces tells the story of a dying Jewish woman, born and raised on the east coast of America; it takes place in a refugee camp in an unnamed country, which could be the US in an alternative reality or imagined future. Through the narrator we learn of Sophie’s lost love, a love she abandoned for reasons which, in the scheme of all that has occurred and of her impending and lonely death, now seem insignificant.

A sense of displacement and fear pervades the collection. In “Future Emergencies”, “after 9/11, after the establishment of Homeland Security, when the factory of America’s imagination had achieved its peak production of threats, attacks, conspiracies”, the inhabitants of an again unnamed city are issued with gas masks. A man puts his on and suddenly appears to his girlfriend as a different person: “ugly and menacing, a strange creature I’d never seen before”.

The past is reckoned with; the significance of events, relationships, even the meaning of films are reinterpreted. The question of who we are at different times and places, and with different people, comes masterfully to the fore in that final story, “To Be a Man”. A couple narrate diverging versions of the end of a marriage while a German man tells his Jewish lover that he would have been a Nazi had he lived during the Third Reich – that he sees in himself all the attributes to make such a destiny, for someone like him, inevitable. How much do we really know ourselves and each other? These questions linger long after the final pages of this supremely intelligent collection.

• To Be a Man is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.