MARK SHECHNER
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and clarity. Moreover, by assembling his essays, reviews , and fiction into the
portrait of an intellectual and emotional life, one can see his career as em–
blematic, standing for larger historical designs. Rosenfeld 's career took
shape under the shadow of an extraordinary history, one that included the
betrayal of the Russian revolution , the failures and eventual collapse of the
American left, the rise and defeat of Hitler, the destruction of Europe's
Jews, and the massive embourgeoisement ofJews in America. To have been
aJew and a writer at the end of the war was
to
be confronted by that history
and forced to respond, and Rosenfeld was one who responded symbolically,
with his whole being. He became the sort ofJew and writer that, as he saw
it, the age demanded.
An Age of Enormity ,
the selection of Rosenfeld's
essays and reviews that Theodore Solotaroff published in 1962 , is an im–
portant book for it concentrates the ephemera of Rosenfeld 's scattered criti–
cism into something that looks like an
oeuvre,
thereby becoming the distil–
late of that unique cast of radical , urban intelligence that was Rosenfeld's
stock-in-trade .
Age
is also a workbook in the rhetoric of literary criticism; its
shortest reviews are srudies in subtlety, clarity, and economy. That this
distillation of Rosenfeld's career, like the career itself, is fairly small, is part
of its fascination; the book has all the charisma that belongs to both intensity
and incompleteness.
By contrast, the fiction
is
not, for the most part, so happily rediscovered.
It has been characterized in the past as a fiction of alienation, and it is just
that. Its themes press as close to the experience of the isolated ego in con–
frontation with the void as anything the postwar generation produced, and
yet it is largely an unsatisfactory fiction , as fumbling in its rhetoric and
technique as the criticism is confident. It is a philosophical fiction that lacks
a proper voice, or, at times, has too much voice altogether. Rosenfeld pos–
sessed a discursive, rather than dramatic, imagination and was better at
explaining or arguing than he was at creating.
Passage from Home
is an
especially shaky book. The open and leisurely form of the novel was appar–
ently too spacious for an expert in concentration, and Rosenfeld , in the
writing, seemed to tire of the ordinary machinery of story telling, especially
in those long interludes between meditations on life in which his characters
are sent out to act and speak on their own . The stories in
Alpha and Omega
are generally more satisfying though even there Rosenfeld's narrative voices
-especially the nerveless style of allegory-in-translation that he cultivated
for a while in honor of Kafka and Hesse-blunt the edge of his superb
intelligence . Still, at least four stories: "The Hand that Fed Me, " "Alpha
and Omega," "Wolfie," and " King Solomon," strike me as good pieces
of writing, though even among them, only "Wolfie" delivers the surge of
feeling that we expect of the essays at their best. Finally, while some of the
