STEVEN
J.
ZIPPERSTEIN
Isaac Rosenfeld's
Dybbuk
and Rethinking
Literary Biography
There were evenings in Barrow Street, while I played the violin part
in Bach's B-minor to Isaac's flute, when his musical ense of style
would make me gasp. It was as exquisite as his handwriting. Isaac
always meant
to
perform well. The flute dominates the B-minor
Suite, and Isaac certainly came in strong. The sound of these notes
reverberating off Isaac's breath like water drops were of a silvery
intensity. It seemed
to
me that Isaac expressed himself in perfection
at last, wrote his signature on the air.
-Alfred Kazin,
New York Jew
E
legiac in tone, the passage is meant, as I see it, to consign Isaac
Rosenfeld to the dustbin. In Alfred Kazin's contentious, competi–
tive literary milieu, to write one's "signature on the air" was, in
effect, to disappear. And Rosenfeld, who succumbed
to
a fatal heart
attack at the age of thirty-eight, in
1956,
has had his death depicted
often-and often by some of his closest friends-as all-but-inevitable, as
the severe, but also curiously just price for failing
to
live up to one's
potential. Death, in short, as the ultimate price for writer's block.
Isaac Rosenfeld's death fascinated, even obsessed his contemporaries
in the circle that came to be known as the New York intellectuals. The
film, "Bye, Bye Braverman" was built around the tragedy. It was
inspired, in turn, by a novel about the day of Rosenfeld 's death written
by Wallace Markfield,
To an Early Grave.
Saul Bellow would later cap–
ture Rosenfeld-as King Dahfu, a tragic hero who dies-in
Henderson
and the Rain King
where the monarch was modeled, as Bellow has
admitted, after his lifelong friend . Early drafts of Bellow's
Humboldt 's
Gift
were inspired as much by Rosenfeld as by Delmore Schwartz; the
novel's title recalls the expansive neighborhood park where Rosenfeld
and Bellow spent so much time together as teenagers.
Humboldt's Gift
is, too, of course, a tale of promise, of intellectual waste, dissipation,
and premature death.
Rosenfeld, a writer of great promise and stature in the
1940S
and
early
'50S,
was the author of the novel,
Passage From Home
(1946),
and
many essays and short stories. At his height, he was seen-as Irving
