Lokschen and Isaac Rosenfeld's Jewish American Voice

In Isaac Rosenfeld's superb and complex story "The World of the Ceiling," a young Jewish intellectual, much like the author, finds himself aiming for an unhindered life of the mind while hampered by a mundane material world. "I was a very serious young man," writes the narrator, "interested only in philosophy and politics, with a way of wrinkling my face in thought which I had copied from a portrait of Hegel. I had no girlfriends, no frivolities; I had a Weltanschauung" (Shechner 367). Although he is well aware of the social snobberies and vices of the philosophers he emulates, he admits that he would prefer to pretend that the life of the mind, in his terms "the world of the ceiling," is an alternative for a man of his refined sensibility. When he tires of philosophizing indoors, he also has the extraordinary gift of being able to step out into the gritty New York streets and "walk right into a drift of snow in nineteenth century Russia" (368) as if he inhabited the landscape of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Dressed as a muzhik, he hears the jingle of a troika, and is witness to a heroic revolutionary act carried out by a "violently beautiful" Slavic woman "with dreadful black eyes and black hair" (369). Swept into the drama of youthful protest, he folds incendiary leaflets inside his coat, while a Cossack whip whistles over his head, only to discover that he has run into the side of a New York city laundry truck whose driver, "the Cossack," shouts, "Hey! Yu wanna get kilt?" (369). Forced to return to America, he writes, "It seems to me that I am in St. Petersburg, in a foreign city, in a foreign time, and the signs on the street and the shop windows, in large English letters, Undertaker, Malted Milk, are in Russian, and in the old Russian, of the days of Nicholas" (370).

It is not surprising that a young leftist Jewish intellectual of the 1950s would find nineteenth-century Russia as portrayed by its great novelists more alluring than the "ugly, narrow, crowded street in which we live, full of smoke and noise" (370). We also understand that German Enlightenment philosophy valorizing the spirit would appeal to the secular aspirations of a young Jewish writer, even if Hegel saw the Jew's insistence on corporeality as his eternal barrier to genuine engagement with the life of the mind. The romantic Cyrillic alphabet gives way to the lowly American English words, italicized as foreign to a Jewish intellectual, just as muzhik and troika are foreign, but more sympathetic than malted milk. The narrator, after all, has a weltanschauung, the sign of his continuing life on the ceiling. With these selected non-English words, Rosenfeld has pinpointed his speaker's location: first-generation American condescending to his immediate environment and longing for an idealized world of kultur. In short, his character has been set up for the inevitable fall enabled by the introduction of two other languages in this story, Yiddish and Chinese.

He may sneer at the shop window ads in English, but given that his literary ambitions depend on his originality in English, he also sneers at would-be Americans who cannot master the language. Despite the fact that the Chinese launderer, with the Americanized name of George Lee, has "yet to speak an intelligible word of English" (370), he plans to use him to flaunt esoteric knowledge to his friends. The popularity of inexpensive Chinese food among Jewish Americans is legendary, and cleverly satirized several years later in Roth's "Defender of the Faith" when a telltale eggroll blows the cover of a Jewish soldier whose leave was granted to attend a Passover seder. Wanting to impress his friends by ordering an authentic Chinese dish rather than faux chop suey, the narrator of "The World of the Ceiling" asks George to write "real Chinese dishes" in Chinese characters on a slip of paper that he eventually hands to the waiter in Chinatown, dismissing the others at the table as "tourists." With visions of "ten-thousand-year-old...