BOOK REVIEW : Making an Art of Straddling the Fence : THE I. L. PERETZ READER; <i> Edited and with an introduction by Ruth R. Wisse</i> Schocken Books $24.95, 359 pages

God chose His people and has given them a terrible time of it ever since. Part of the terrible time was having to wonder if, after all, he had forgotten about the choice. God should be reminded.

Reminding is one of the bright strands that runs through the treasure of the Jewish word over the millennia. It reappears in all its rich variety of Scripture, commentary, prayer, lamentation, exhortation, poetry, jokes, folk tales and down into the literature of the present day. As in the conversation of a besotted and not-too-confident lover, no matter what the subject, the doubt keeps wriggling up: What about you and me?

Out of such an anxiety the speaker entreats; when entreaty meets silence, the speaker glosses the silence in all kinds of different ways: by making laws and by elaborating upon them, by riddles and paradoxes, by lyrical bursts of mysticism and the dry containments of irony; by language that never stops dancing and sometimes seems never to stop.

In the tales, travel notes, memoirs and one narrative poem contained in the “I.L. Peretz Reader,” we hear the voices that keep breaking in on their own stories. Whether secular or religious--Peretz, who wrote at the turn of the century, was somewhere in between--the story is offered, respectively, to God or the universe. And the voice interrupts or distracts to remind: Are You there? Do You hear me? We think of Jeremiah, the Gemara, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s people and--yes--of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman.

“Isaac Lebush Peretz was arguably the most important figure in the development of modern Jewish culture--and until 1939 one would not have had to argue the claim at all,” according to Ruth R. Wisse, editor of this collection translated from the Yiddish. When he died in Warsaw in 1915 at 63, 100,000 people attended his funeral, she tells us; later, schools, libraries and organizations all over the world were named for him.

As a young Polish Jew, a believer in socialism, science and human progress, he thought that the Jewish communities of Europe could integrate themselves into the Western world while retaining their character and culture. He deplored the backwardness of the shtetls while wanting to preserve some of their values.

As he grew older, and the early 19th-Century idealism of the Eastern European nationalists turned chauvinist, he came to realize the difficulty of the straddle. Progress was all but denied the Jews of Poland, the Ukraine, Lithuania; sometimes life was, as well. Peretz could never share their hermetic, other-worldly religion, but he came to see, as Wisse writes, that it “created a civilization of remarkable moral refinement.”

Out of the straddle came his writings, showing the pain of contradiction, and often its fertility. The tales, which occupy most of the book, vary widely. Some have the form and tone of simple folk tales. Others suggest a Hasidic-like mysticism, sometimes approaching the surreal. The best, I think, combine both a sympathy for the values of the shtetl and a note of irony.

“Bryna’s Mendl” presents the other-worldly scholar, Mendl, and his practical, hard-working wife Bryna. It is not the stereotype of the saint and the shrew. For one thing, Mendl is not a very good scholar; furthermore, he lives in carefully guarded comfort, and eats very well. His guard and feeder is the gentle and admiring Bryna, who sees to everything and denies herself food, which she gives him. Her only defect is to die. Mendl is aggrieved.

“It had never occurred to him that Bryna would not outlive him. Not with such a husband. Such children, such comfort,” Peretz writes, and adds the deadly sentence: “Bryna, who had attracted no notice in life, was barely visible on her deathbed. She was so thin!”

In “Three Gifts,” a soul denied admission either to heaven or hell because his good and evil deeds balanced precisely, is offered a last chance if he can return with three reports of perfect virtue. He finds a Jew who fights to the death to defend a bag of Palestine soil from robbers; another who stops to pick up his fallen yarmulke while running a gantlet of soldiers with clubs, and a Jewish woman who pins her skirt to her thigh to preserve modesty while being dragged to her death by horses.

The angels applaud as the soul returns with the bloodied soil, cap and pin. It would be a charming morality tale had Peretz not added the voice of “A Connoisseur”: “Ah, what beautiful gifts. Of course, they’re totally useless--but to look at, they’re perfection itself.”

And we wonder: Is Peretz “the connoisseur”? Is he an applauding angel? Straddle is made art.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Ethel: The Fictional Autobiography” by Tema Nason (Delacorte).