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PARTISAN REVIEW
disdain for the main currents of American life . Alienation was the mark of
their exile and their caste. In the 1950s, when universities, fellowships, and
publishing opportunities opened up to them, their alienation lost its rhetor–
ical credit, and their militant aloofness crumbled before their opportunities.
Notes from underground are not customarily issued from high places. Yet
Rosenfeld stood apart from the new order of things and applied himself to
psychological needs that could not be met by position, comfort, and respect–
ability. His experience of alienation cut deeper than the shared rhetoric of
his generation, for it issued from his struggles with himself rather than his
quarrels with the world. A representative figure in the 1940s, an itinerant
intellectual with only a
Weltanschauung
to call home, he drifted in the
1950s from the center of the intellectual culture to the periphery, allowing
the era of prosperity and accommodation to pass by without him. "No
matter where he was or what job he had," observes Solotaroff, "he kept
himself in the clear, taking risks of instabiliry and independence, or uncer–
tainty, sterility, and failure." While others made their peace with upward
mobility, Rosenfeld warred against its seductions in a private battle whose
victories and costs were known only to himself and his family . It is difficult
to know what to make of his example, for what looks like paralysis from one
quarter may appear to be heroism from another. After his death, Saul
Bellow praised him in a brief
Partisan Review
obituary for not having fol–
lowed "the fat Gods" and interpreted his stubborn refusal to be reconciled
to the new order of things as courage, and its consequences as victories of
the spirit. And so they may have been. But Rosenfeld himself was not deli–
cate about emotions and understood well enough that heroic abstinence was
a sign of trouble.
Instead of the fat Gods, he followed an austere personal logic that
comprehended both psychoanalysis and Jewishness, and indeed held them to
be complementary glosses on the same reality . His Jewishness was not a
received attitude; it had nothing in it of easy piety or easy comedy. Nor was
it even a clearly defined quality.
It
had constantly to be grappled with,
revised, and, most importantly, imagined.
It
was a severely literary Jewish–
ness, pieced together out of folklore, myth, and fiction, especially out of
Franz Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Y.L. Peretz, and Isaac Babel. Nowhere was
Rosenfeld's total imaginative response to the objects of his contemplation
more evident or more touching than in his writing onJews. In a story about
his
boyhood, "The World of the Ceiling"
(Midstream,
2, 1956, not reprinted
in
Alpha and Omega),
he recalled the intensity of his early literary fantasies,
his pleasure in imagining himself a revolutionary in Czarist Russia, hiding
out from Cossack patrols, hopelessly in love with the dark-eyed Yevgenia
Borisovna, the darling of the organization, who is unfortunately' 'as cold as
