538
PARTISAN REVIEW
Which is just as we would expect of a manic-depressive .
It
was the manic in
him and its extraordinary influence upon those around him that emerges
from the testimony of his friends . But like all manics, he paid the depressive
price. The depressive side of Rosenfeld was more reclusive; its retreat and
habitat was his writing. There, at any rate, is where we discover it.
Through most of the 1940s the expansive Rosenfeld was sustained by
his reading of Reich whose concept of character was more or less that of a
balloon; it saw human nature as swelled by eros from within and held taut
by resistance at the outer boundaries. The balloon character gave Rosenfeld
a fine way
to
imagine his exuberance and his alienation; exuberance was
overinflation, depression depressurization. But by the end of the decade,
Jewishness had replaced mental health as
his
ultimate sanction and orgonomy
had given way before Chassidism as the justifying myth of his vitalism.
Solotaroff has called Rosenfeld a Chassid and that seems to be right, espe–
cially as Rosenfeld came
to
imagine his manic vitalism to be a phase of his
Jewishness. One of his important reviews in 1949 was of Maurice Samuel's
Prince of the Ghetto,
a retelling of the stories ofY.L. Peretz, the Warsaw
social worker and intellectual whose writing was popular amongJews around
the turn of the century. (This review is not included
inAge.)
Though Peretz's
social views were consistent with those of a progressive, Europeanized intel–
lectual, he had devoted his literary career to telling Chassidic tales of rabbin–
ical wonders. Such a double career appealed to Rosenfeld as all psychic
balancing acts did; it was another image of a mind in contradiction, whose
means of resolution might
be
a model for his own. Peretz's synthesis, as
Rosenfeld saw it, was a brand of secular religiosity that yoked the idea of an
indwelling God, a piece of divinity within each man, to a cultural national–
ism that had the Jews becoming more European by becoming more Jewish.
Peretz did not share in the transcendental rabbinical tradition , but did
identify with its enthusiasm which he valued as over against •. the bourgeois
spirit. " The complexity of Peretz's character and achievement spoke for
Rosenfeld's own ambivalences:
"It
was balanced between the sacred and the
secular, radical and conservative; his expression as a poet and intellectual,
between the religio-mythic and the sociological." The synthesis lay in Peretz's
character itself, which embraced a naturalistic vitality which "took the
Chassidic ecstacies not as ultimate things , visions in the midst of appear–
ances , that disclose the noumenal world, but rather as the immediate phe–
nomena in a radiance of this world ."
If Rosenfeld had a rabbinical strain in him it was of the sort he identi–
fied in Peretz, that of the awakener and enlightener-the unlocker of creative
energy. He shared with Peretz an intense commitment to the "joy in this
world, the eros and agape at one in nature ." Indeed, it was precisely this
