BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Two Diverse Tributes to a Late Statesman : IN THE NAME OF SORROW AND HOPE by Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof; Knopf $21, 208 pages : SHALOM, FRIEND: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin by the Jerusalem Report staff : edited by David Horovitz; Newmarket Press $24.95, 352 pages

Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof’s 15 minutes of fame were bestowed upon her under the most appalling circumstances--she is the granddaughter of the slain prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and she endeared herself to a global television audience when she delivered a heartfelt eulogy at Rabin’s state funeral.

“I imagine that angels are accompanying you now,” said the young woman, whose raw and unrehearsed grief distinguished the 19-year-old Israeli woman from the kings and presidents who used the funeral as an occasion for politics and diplomacy. “We will love you, Saba [Grandpa], forever.”

Now, only months after Rabin’s assassination, Noa Ben Artzi-Pelossof has expanded upon her simple eulogy with a longer work in which she celebrates her grandfather while, at the same time, allowing us to glimpse the more private moments of her own life.

At the same time, the staff of the Jerusalem Report, under the editorship of David Horovitz, has rushed into print with “Shalom, Friend,” a group effort at biography by a gang of seasoned reporters. Despite its sentimental title, “Shalom, Friend” offers a more acute and informed appreciation of Rabin as a public figure than his grief-stricken granddaughter can be expected to provide.

These two books may satisfy a certain curiosity about Yitzhak Rabin in the immediate wake of his assassination--and they also function as a kind of public mourning over a martyred peacemaker. But we must hope that neither of these books will be the last word on Rabin, “a son of Israel and the father of its future” (as Hirsh Goodman puts it in his prologue to “Shalom, Friend”).

Ben Artzi-Pelossof shows us Rabin through the eyes of an adoring grandchild, a young woman who has been prompted by some enterprising editor or agent to reveal to the world what she readily calls “my private loss, my private pain.”

So her book is almost too intimate, and I could not help but feel embarrassed that she has been asked to come up with anecdotes of family life to fill out what is otherwise a reprise of her eulogy and a mini-biography of her grandfather.

“To be ‘Yitzhak Rabin’s granddaughter’ had become something of a habit for me, almost a way of life,” she writes. “But beyond Grandpa’s high public profile, first as a soldier and then as a politician, for me he was always first and foremost my grandfather.”

Thus, for example, she dutifully acknowledges the political scandal that prompted her grandfather to resign from the office of prime minister in the late 1970s, and she feels compelled to disclose the tensions that led to the divorce of her parents at about the same time. But what can she say about events, public or private, that took place when she was a newborn?

By contrast, “Shalom, Friend” is an urgent journalistic enterprise by the staff of an English-language newsmagazine in Jerusalem, many of them Americans who used to work in Los Angeles. The book removes the “chain-smoking, whiskey-liking” Rabin from the pedestal on which he has been placed in the gallery of martyrs and allows us to view him in the context of Israel’s overheated domestic politics and complex international diplomacy.

Both of these books are earnest and decent efforts, but each one is limited by the circumstances under which it was written.

“Shalom, Friend” does a better job of chronicling the life of Rabin than we are entitled to expect from an “instant book,” but it shows all the tool marks of committee journalism and history written from the headlines.

And “In the Name of Sorrow and Hope” is a tender and touching eulogy, but Ben Artzi-Pelossof is only fleshing out what she said with greater eloquence at the funeral that, tragically, made her famous in the first place.