Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (review)

Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-1956), was the most minor of the major Jewish American writers, the most private of 20^th century public intellectuals. His greatest work consists of unpublished letters and journal entries. From the beginning of his brief career he has always inspired a personal response from his admirers; when his one published novel, Passage from Home, appeared in 1946, it drew uniquely heartfelt reviews from otherwise Olympian-voiced readers such as Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Rosenfeld's childhood friend Saul Bellow. Fifty-three years after his death from heart failure, Rosenfeld has inspired another emotional, loving, and remarkably intimate portrait from one of contemporary America's leading historians, Stanford Professor Steven Zipperstein. Rosenfeld's Lives represents a remarkable departure in Zipperstein's career, as well as in the possibilities for literary biography, and in both respects it is a triumph that, like the book's subject, cuts across disciplines, intellectual affiliations, and the boundaries between public and private. The result is an insightful portrait of a neglected personality and the circumstances under which he lived, worked, and perished.

For members of his own generation, with varying degrees of affection and contempt, Rosenfeld became the posthumous symbol of lost, failed promise. He died too young and left a desk drawer full of unfinished projects. Yet as Zipperstein's portrait demonstrates for a reader having already achieved Rosenfeld's years—and then some—his legacy seems far less disappointing: a (good) novel at 28, roughly 15 short stories published in as many years, and hundreds of essays and book reviews: hardly the resume of an idle or undisciplined mind; more, in fact, than the now canonical Walter Benjamin could claim at a similar juncture in his truncated life, and more, as well, than nearly any public intellectual under the age of 40 (and then some) in the present moment. Indeed, when reviewing the possible candidates in a foreseeably abortive search for someone to fill Rosenfeld's role, one recognizes immediately that there is no one in American culture today who can claim command of ideas and the art of narrative to the degree that Rosenfeld aspired. One can write novels, or practice journalism, or maybe, most desperately, compete for tenure at a university, but certainly not do all three, and probably not succeed at even two.

From the vantage point of the current generation, which has arguably experienced the longest adolescence and apprenticeship in history, the era into which Rosenfeld came of age was nearly unique in the expectations placed on its youth, and the standards—most of them unreasonable—to which those young people, Rosenfeld paramount among them, held themselves. Is the essay that Rosenfeld salvaged from an unfinished book on Gandhi any less impressive than whole books published by his contemporaries, but mostly unread or appreciated today only by reputation? Perhaps in the current age of electronically induced graphomania—blogs, web journals, Facebook, and Twitter—Rosenfeld's combination of reticence and impatience can acquire the appearance of discretion? Like Jorge Luis Borges, Rosenfeld recognized that a fascinating book review is preferable to an unreadable book. And if now he is known more for the books he didn't write than the two or three posthumous volumes he did, is his intellectual integrity and engagement with the world around him less admirable as a result?

One should not overstate comparisons between Rosenfeld and Benjamin or Borges, neither of whom would have indulged, even in a private letter, an image as careless and cavalier as "long furry tubes like vulvas or subways" (34). Much of what remained in Rosenfeld's desk drawer clearly should have, and though the same could be said of the published writing of many of his contemporaries, nonetheless these figures created a discourse and culture to which Rosenfeld, outside of Zipperstein's biography, will always remain a footnote. Zipperstein himself ponders this fate...