Fiedler on the Roof

Fiedler ( What Was Literature? ) is as fresh and iconoclastic as ever in these 12 essays and lectures culled from the last two decades. One of the best pieces exposes anti-Semitism in Thomas Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, then shows how stereotypes found in Chaucer, Shakespeare and Grimm reinforce anti-Jewish prejudices. Claiming that archetypal heroes of gentile literature, from Jesus to Galahad, ``have been portrayed as birthright Jews,'' the eminent critic intriguingly argues that Perceval, knight of the Holy Grail legend, is Jewish, and analyzes Leopold Bloom of Joyce's Ulysses as a self-deprecating Irish Jew. He takes to task culturally assimilated Jewish-American writers like Henry Roth and Nathaniel West, and calls Norman Mailer's novel of Egypt, Ancient Evenings, ``a deliberate inversion of the myth of the exodus.'' Fielder also wrestles with his own Jewish identity, meditates on the Holocaust and Job, and critiques Malamud, Singer and Styron in this gutsy, exciting, freewheeling collection. (May)