Mazel

One expects provocative fiction from Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem), a quality amply fulfilled in her third novel,which is also her most accessible and beguiling. She has not, however, abandoned her philosophical turn of mind: the central question here is whether fate or chance (luck, or mazel) has the most influence on life's circumstances. To Sasha Saunders, nee Sorel Sonnenberg, born in a Polish shtetl and now a sophisticated New Yorker, there is no question that mazel is the predominant factor. Her daughter Chloe, a professor of classics at Columbia, and her granddaughter Phoebe (seen previously in the short-story collection Strange Attractors), a Princeton mathematician, lean toward determinism. But Sasha, an ``irrepressible champion of chance and disorder,'' considers the death of her beloved older sister, Fraydel, the chance event and catalyst by which her life has taken shape. When the family moved to Warsaw, Sasha became the star player in an avant garde Yiddish theater group; WWII eventually brought her to America but never extinguished her irreverence and instinct for drama. While all the characters are etched with compassion and wit, Goldstein's portrayal of Fraydel is haunting; this character's frantic, incandescent imagination is expressed in a prescient folktale that she relates. Goldstein conjures the world of the shtetl with rare grace and affection; her portrayal of Jewish life in Warsaw before the war captures the heady excitement, the intellectual ferment and the cultural vigor of that doomed era. She is equally acute in describing the Orthodox Jewish community of Lipton, N.J., where the rituals and traditions of shtetl life have been preserved--with, as Sasha says, ``a designer label.'' Laughter and tears are summoned equally by this novel, one that discriminating readers won't want to miss. (Oct.)