MARK SHECHNER
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writing as a relaxed and genial manner. One of his best stories, "King
Solomon," was written during this period as was the draft of an essay, " Life
in Chicago, " which is included in
An Age ofEnormity.
Rosenfeld's King
Solomon is a foppish old Jew, an overweight, cigar-smoking, pinochle–
playing monarch who can barely recall his former wisdom but is still beloved
by young girls who come from all over Judea, or is it Brooklyn, to lie beside
him and place their hands on his breast. At the age of sixty he is courted
fiercely by an overblown, bejeweled Queen of Sheba, a former Jewish prin–
cess who
has
left himself go a little and who, for all her wiles, cannot arouse in
him the passion to get up from his pinochle. But there is little tension in
this; Solomon's pain is only a distant, geriatric melancholy. This king is the
Emmett Kelly of biblical patriarchs. Rosenfeld's Chicago too is a typical
creation.
It
is Janus-faced in having a dry and land-locked midwestern side
and one that is wet, lake-lined, and eastern-such a schizoid Chicago as a
Rosenfeld would discover. The themes here are Rosenfeldian enough but
in both cases the pressure of utgency has gone out of the writing and in its
place is an unexpected acceptance : "King Solomon" is only gently ironic
and the Chicago essay is cool, urban sociology. There is no way of knowing
from the writing alone what sort of change we're seeing or what brought it
about, though I am inclined to be sceptical of most claims for breakthrough.
Nor can one say what new creative potentials were set into play by the new
mood, though the story and the essay are evidence that something signifi–
cant was possible. But Rosenfeld 's heart attack cut things short and perma–
nently shaped his career, the major feature of which is the brutal, downward
curve of depression.
Yet that is what makes Rosenfeld so exemplary a figure. The pursuit
of innerness with such devotion is rare in any case and the sheer intensity of
Rosenfeld's quest calls attention to it. That the visible product was small was
in keeping with the venture itself, one of distilling life into its essentials .
Such a stripping bare was a rirual enactment of a fantasy of culture-a graft
of guilt and mourning upon his genius leading him from one rite of purifi–
cation
to
another in search of the essential man, andJew, within. Rosenfeld 's
essays and stories were reports back from some beleaguered
stetl
of the soul
where intense, bearded men still swayed over their Torahs in the musty
schuls
of exile, believing yet that their scholarship, their disputation, their
enthusiasm for righteousness mattered greatly to God. Possessed of that
fantasy and the sense of unspeakable loss in which it took root, Rosenfeld
mythicized himself and became, at least emotionally, the last ghetto Jew. In
other words, he found his cultural identity among the realms of his own
dead, which, for an American Jew in search of himself in an age of so much
enormity, was not so implausible a thing to do .
