If I Forget Thee .. .

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (298 pp.)--Philip Roth--Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

All but one of the six stories in this collection deal with a problem that has concerned Jews throughout history: Should they or should they not let themselves be assimilated? Most of the Jewish characters in this book have succumbed to the alien and often tempting culture in which they live. Instead of being called Moses or Miriam, children are named Sheila, Kevin, Brenda, Neil. Scythelike noses have been bobbed into gentile unobtrusiveness, Talmudic scholars replaced by star athletes and Socialist singers of

U.S. folk songs. Jewish businessmen, leaving Rotarian lunches with their gentile colleagues, are offended by the sight of a shambling, stoop-shouldered old man with a Judaic beard and earlocks.

But the wrenching break from the past has its disasters. The longest and best story, Goodbye, Columbus, is about Jews who have made the ascent from grubby Newark to the green pastures of suburban Short Hills, NJ. Mr. Patimkin is a rich manufacturer of kitchen sinks, "tall, strong, ungrammatical, and a ferocious eater." Son Ronald was an all-state basketball player in high school and a Big Ten star at Ohio State. Daughter Brenda is beautiful, plays crack tennis and goes to Radcliffe. Her suitor, Neil Klugman, tells of his summer affair with Brenda--a daytime round of basketball, pingpong, mile runs, swimming races, and a nighttime series of assignations with Brenda. The affair ends badly for everyone, with Brenda ravished, her mother prostrated, her brother a musclebound failure in business, and her father writing gamely: "You have to have faith in your children like in a Business or any serious undertaking and there is nothing that is so bad that we can't forgive especially when Our own flesh and blood is involved."

Newark-born Philip Roth, 26, onetime English instructor at the University of Chicago, is a Jew himself and writes of Jews with an absorbing ambivalence of hate and love. Author Roth's broadly farcical stories, The Conversion of the Jews and Epstein, are too heavyhanded; but his tender passages between young Jews in love are often a delight, and his set pieces--weddings, multiple-course dinners, the frequent inability of Jews and gentiles to understand each other though using the same language--have style and the outrageousness of life itself.

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