552
PARTISAN REVIEW
Jewish in this need to wrestle with the hovering
Zeitgeist.?
"For two
thousand years the main energies of Jewish communities ... have
gone into the mass production of intellectuals " -so Harold Rosen–
berg had once written. Here now, with appropriate f1air and chaos,
were a number of them, cut off from traditional attachments either
Jewish or American, casting themselves as agents of the problem–
atic, straining for high thought and career.
The first New York writer with whom I became friendly was a
recent arrival from Chicago.
Wunderkind
grown into tubby sage,
Isaac Rosenfeld radiated a generosity that melted the crustiest New
York hear ts. It was easy to imagine him , as his childhood friend Saul
Bellow recalled, getting up at a debating club in school, still in short
pants, and reading an essay on Schopenhauer ; it was not hard to
imagine him in a Vilna yeshiva, elucidating points of Talmud. Owl–
ish and jovial but with sudden lilts of dignity, loving jokes even more
than arguments, he had a mind strong at unsystematic ref1ection,
though he never quite found the medium, in either fiction or essay,
to release his gift. He was also a delicious mimic. Visiting Isaac , I
would beg him to do his Yiddish version of Prufrock-"ikh ver alt,
ikh ver alt, un mayn pupik vert mir kalt" (I grow old, I grow old
and my bellybutton grows cold)-or his devilish skit about Rahv
and Phillips, now def1ated to Weber and Fields , spatting over who
should go downstairs to buy stamps. fsaac seemed a literary off–
spring of Sholom Aleichem but his mind had succumbed to Kafka–
not , as it turned out, a happy affair. Still, he was our golden boy,
more so than Bellow , for there was an air of yeshiva purity about
Isaac that made one hope wildly for his future. Prof1igate with his
being, his time, his thought, he lacked only that cunning economy
that enables writers to sustain lengthy careers.
I learned from Isaac the possibility of a life unf1inching in rest–
lessness, chained to some absolute of the
luftmensh.
Chaos besieged
his orderly mind, engulfing his Jewish reasonableness. He became a
wanderer, physically and intellectually, out of step even with his own
\
dybbuk. He played minor parts for a time in a third-rate Yiddish
theatrical troupe; he closed himself into a Wilhelm Reich orgone box
to grasp superior energies; he wanted to get past his skepticism and
stretch beyond known definitions of person and place. Jewish to his
bones, he sought a way of leaping beyond those constraints that in
our time signify J ewishness, and all that stood in his way was his
body, his country, his time. At thirty-eight he died, in lonely sloth.
