Mark Shechner
ISAAC ROSENFELD'S WORLD
When it came to reading books, Isaac Rosenfeld was the very
best.
Yet
we scarcely hear of him now, twenty-one years after his death in a
furnished room on Walton Street on Chicago's near North side. In recent
years his reputation has gone into eclipse . Neither the collection of essays
and reviews,
An Age ofEnormity ,
nor his novel,
Passage from Home,
nor
the stories,
Alpha and Omega,
is currently in print, and there are no appar–
ent plans to reissue them. Rosenfeld was thirty-eight when he died ; that is,
in mid-career. For fIfteen of those years he had been a fIxture in the Eastern
intellectual establishment and for a time, even, a center of activity among
the second-generation Jewish intellectuals who congregated in New York
during the 1940s. He had broken in as a poet and storywriter for the
New
Republic
in 1941 at the age of twenty-four and by the end of the war was a
regular contributor there, as well as to
Partisan Review, Commentary,
the
New Leader,
and the
Nation.
If one counts all the briefest reviews, Rosen–
feld's bibliography was considerable, though, as with many another writer
who has had to hustle his living at the typewriter, many of his accomplish–
ments appear now to have been unpremeditated triumphs of occasion. In
fIfteen years his productivity in fIction was small and uneven in quality, and
as a critic he wrote neither a book nor many essays of more than a few pages.
He was
best
known as a reviewer , and frequently enough of books that
dropped rapidly from sight soon after publication, like Gladys Schmitt's
David the King,
Jo Sinclair's
Wasteland,
Marguerite Young's
Angel in the
Forest,
Albert Halper's
The Little People,
and Nancy Hale's
The Prodigal
Woman.
Here, then, was a career whose proftle sounds like a recipe for oblivion
and for which too extravagant a claim should not
be
made . Rosenfeld's
career
was
a small one, and its importance stands quite apart from the weight
of its achievements. Instead of weight, Rosenfeld offers the fIerce lucidity
that belongs to distillations and miniatures, and to have
come
upon him
suddenly, as I did
some
two years ago, is to discover a rich source of insight
