Children and Fools

Alternately moving and sardonic, this collection by the late Viennese-born poet gingerly examines the Holocaust from the perspective of the oppressors and the oppressed. Fried is touching in largely autobiographical pieces about his youth in Vienna, his father's death at the hands of the Gestapo, his grandmother's execution in Theresienstadt and his own flight to England. And he is at his sardonic best in the allegory, exemplum and satire that examines German and Austrian response (or lack of one). Take ``Father of All Things,'' which praises a legendary potentate whose mass murders led to discoveries in warfare, medicine, psychology, styptic agents and spot-removers; or ``The Artificers,'' about anti-Nazi professionals who assuage their consciences by cobbling together (and stockpiling) wire cutters, Zyklon-B antidotes and other unused ``rescue appliances.'' Although his style is more straightforward in stories based on his own life, he does keep his distance-his account of the economic hardship of the '30s and subsequent Nazi atrocities that destroyed his family is most completely told through the history of a few pieces of heirloom furniture in ``The Green Suite.'' If this detachment takes away something from the emotional wrenching usual to accounts of the Holocaust, it does not take away any of its validity. (Jan.)