Isaac Rosenfeld and the New York Intellectuals

Monday, May 3, 2010

"We still don't understand what happened to the Jews of Europe, and perhaps we never will." Thus wrote the American intellectual and novelist Isaac Rosenfeld in the February 1948 issue of the New Leader. Arguing that in the wake of the Holocaust the familiar discussion of good and evil had become a useless exercise in nostalgia, he concluded: "Terror beyond evil, and joy beyond good: that is all there is to work with, whether we are to understand what has happened, or begin all over again."

Relevant Links

Isaac Rosenfeld's Dybbuk Steven J. Zipperstein, Partisan Review. In the end, Rosenfeld was both made and arguably undone by the intellectual circle in which he lived: left-wing, post-Trotskyist, Jewish, and competitive in almost epic terms.

Requiem for a Luftmentsh Dara Horn, Jewish Review of Books. Rosenfeld’s brand of public intellectual has been superseded—for the better?—by academic culture.

Promise Fulfilled D.G. Myers, A Commonplace Blog. Although he never produced the Great American Novel, Rosenfeld was a masterful critic and essayist.

This was one of the earliest and still one of the most powerful attempts to render into words the void blasted by the Holocaust into human consciousness. Yet the man who wrote these and many similarly powerful sentences is today remembered, insofar as he is remembered at all, mostly as a legendary failure. His sudden death in 1956 at age thirty-eight, surrounded by a pile of unfinished manuscripts, was the photo finish to what has seemed a waste of great promise, and has made him into a sad, faintly visible comet in the firmament of the fabled New York Jewish intellectuals. Whether he deserves that reputation is the issue addressed in last year's thought-provoking biography by Steven J. Zipperstein.

A lifelong friend of Saul Bellow, Rosenfeld lived the Greenwich Village life of high, difficult ideas and fevered self-exploration—a life known to us most vividly through Bellow's own fictional characters. His lone finished work was a coming-of-age novel; subsequent novels never panned out. The literary work for which he will likely be most remembered is a Yiddish parody of T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Was he confined in a world of disconnected ideas, fatally oblivious of reality? Was he, like other New York intellectuals, trapped by the in-between nature of his era, a period of transition between the passing of traditional modes of Jewish intellection and the new Jewish presence in American universities? Had he lived longer, might he (as Zipperstein suggests) have broken free of the settled judgment of his milieu and realized his literary promise?

Or was he perhaps a casualty of cultural imprisonment? The two regnant mystiques of his time were the mystique of the novel, on the one hand, and of academic scholarship, on the other. Excelling in neither of these sanctified forms, Rosenfeld was most at home, and in literary terms most successful, as a critic and a personal essayist.

Indeed, a certain kind of mind, and certain kinds of truths, are best rendered in that evocative, exploratory genre, which grasps ideas in mid-flight rather than building them either through character and incident or on a bedrock of footnotes. The critical essay was a form well-suited to Jewish life in the immediate postwar period: open-ended, skeptical, argumentative, mixing reason with impressionism, rolling the dice on the power of words to bridge an unbridgeable historical abyss. Rosenfeld was its master.

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