Vol. 69 No. 1 2002 - page 109

STEVEN
J.
ZIPPERSTEIN
109
The term "alone" possessed distinctly dreaded connotations in the
Yiddish-dominated culture in which Bellow, Kazin, Rosenfeld, and so
many of the other New York intellectuals were reared. Little was
deemed worse than being left alone-with no one
to
care for you,
beyond the buzz of talk, beyond the care of family, of loved ones,
beyond all that made life bearable.
It
was in such a state, or so it was
said, that Isaac died . His estranged wife, Vasiliki, and his two children,
Eleni and George, were in New York, where the boisterousness of their
Barrow Street apartment had given way
to
the isolation and anonymity
of a grim rooming house. This was how Rosenfeld's last days would be
recalled. When James Atlas published one of his first poems in the jour–
nal
Poetry,
he titled it, "Isaac Rosenfeld Thinks About His Life."
It
begins with Rosenfeld contemplating life, alone, in a dismal room:
I'm in a single room again.
Always it's the same
a cellar crammed
With papers, ashtrays, books. Even if I chose to survive without
these means,
why is it that I return to this, a way
of life that I would remember as my own?
Similarly, the distinguished poet John Berryman, who taught with
both Bellow and Rosenfeld at the University of Minnesota in the early
fifties, wrote the following poem for Rosenfeld's son, George, soon after
Rosenfeld's death:
"He ought
to
be a father, not a child"–
his own child too said so. I had to glare
into a room where, half-through, he crampt dead,
where all his lovers, seeking his cry, drown,
and the solo I reel in a word disspelled.
Morgan Blum, a colleague of Rosenfeld's at the University of Min–
nesota published a poem in
The New Republic
on September 3,
1956,
entitled, "Isaac Rosenfeld: for a Friend Who Died Alone" :
Isaac, the Age of Reason came of age
That day you stiffened, suffered, died alone:
In capsules, hypos and his cradled phone
Then failed your heart, now whet our frustrate rage.
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