SOURCE: "Three Jews," in No! in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature, Beacon Press, 1960, pp. 93-110.

In the following essay, Fiedler discusses Peretz's work in relation to Jewish culture and the literature of the absurd.

It is fifteen years now since I first read Peretz; and before that for perhaps another ten years I had been aware of him dimly as a name, an institution, a folk hero belonging to the darkness of Europe, the double-darkness of the ghetto from which my grandparents had fled to a sunlit America. It is an irony of communal memory that the bitterest critic of a way of life should be identified in recollection with the world he attacks, and yet it is a constant irony: an enlightened Aeschylus is confused with the bloody world of Agamemnon; a liberal Hawthorne blurs into the rigid Puritan commonwealth of Hester Prynne, an emancipated Peretz...