Isaac Rosenfeld is often remembered as a friend and contemporary of Saul Bellow. He was expected to have a stellar writing career and was seen as a “golden boy.” However, he died at the age of 38 with only one published novel to his credit. In literary circles, his reputation became one of failure, disappointment and the squandering of talents; but recent scholars have reexamined his life and career and now have a more nuanced story to tell.
In Rosenfeld’s uncompleted manuscripts and personal writings, biographers have found, not a failure, but an author deeply committed to the process of writing despite hurdles – someone focused on connecting life to truth.
Born in Chicago to a Jewish family, Rosenfeld’s mother died the same year he was born from the flu epidemic of 1918. His stepmother and aunts stepped in, folding him into a middle-class Jewish community. While Rosenfeld left the Jewish faith later in life, his upbringing and home environment had an important impact on his writing.
Rosenfeld was a life-long friend and rival of author Saul Bellow. (Using the terminology of today, one might call them “frenemies.”) Rosenfeld and Bellow worked on the same student newspaper in high school. In college, they presented a surrealist play “Twin Bananas” in the lobby of the Harper Library at the University of Chicago.
His wit and intellect made him a favorite among other intellectuals on campus. He graduated with a Masters in Literature and married fellow student, Vasiliki Sarantakis. Together, they moved to New York City where Rosenfeld pursued a doctorate in philosophy at NYU. Rosenfeld quickly became a part of the intellectual community in Greenwich Village, surrounded by other writers and creatives. Bellow said he was very influential among their friends “with an unknown power. …we could find nothing to call it but ‘Rosenfeld.’”
Rosenfeld left the doctorate program before graduating to focus on writing. His work explored many concepts, including the impact of sexual repression on society. He was published in various literary publications like The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and Partisan Review. (He won the first Partisan Review literary contest, beating out Bellow.) He also found work as an assistant editor at The New Republic.
Along with short stories, Rosenfeld wrote literary critiques and reviews published in magazines including The New York Times Book Review. Rosenfeld felt that some authors (Irwin Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner) relied on sentimentality instead of showing true human nature, at the same time, he praised Kafka and Andre Gide for their portrayal of the human condition. He was known to be eccentric and in 1943, briefly worked on a barge in New York Harbor.
In 1946, his first, and only, published novel, Passage from Home was hailed as “uniquely American” and compared to the works of Mark Twain and Dostoevsky. A review in The Jewish Frontier called it “a parable of alienation.” The novel follows the story of a young Jewish boy who is unhappy in his stodgy family, leaves home to live with more flamboyant relatives, only to be confronted with the challenges of a Bohemian existence. The book was very well received. Rosenfeld was given a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 1947. There was the expectation that more novels were to come.
Rosenfeld’s marriage to Vasiliki, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce in 1951. While he said he loved his wife deeply, in his personal writings Rosenberg admitted to extra-marital love affairs. He struggled between “the desire to keep the marriage intact and the desire for strong sensations.” He believed strongly that sexual freedom was going to lead to a utopia. “Our joy will be in love and restoration…”
Rosenfeld was inquisitive. He, along with Bellow, followed the teachings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich who treated ailments with a device called an “Orgone accumulator” – a box where one would sit and breathe deeply, taking in what Reich called the “universal life force” or “orgone gas.” (It should be said that there is no evidence that orgone gas exists.) Rosenfeld ended up abandoning this “treatment” later in life, as did Bellow.
In the 1950s, Rosenfeld moved back to the midwest, teaching at the University of Minnesota, where Bellow was also a faculty member. During this time, Rosenfeld wrote another novel, The Enemy, described by some as “Kafkaesque.” The novel explores the dilemma of a soldier trying to justify his actions during war. Rosenfeld was unable to find a publisher for the book. Rejection of the novel shook him.
Rosenfeld also mourned the changes in Greenwich Village during the 1950s: “… the rent has gone up on Bohemia, and it’s only the advertising men who can afford to live in the studios.” In 1954, he returned to the University of Chicago, this time to teach literature.
Rosenfeld died at the age of 38 in his apartment in Chicago. At the time of his death, he was working on several novels and writing sketches for the Compass Players (who went on to become Second City). His obituary in The New York Times mentioned he was writing a book on the Chicago Fire.
Of his death, Bellow wrote: “During the last years of his life, he was solitary, and on Walton Place in one of his furnished rooms, he died alone.” (It’s important to note, that just previous to his death, Rosenberg had moved from Walton Place where he last saw Bellow, to a nicer apartment on Huron Street.)
Towards the end of Rosenfeld’s novel Passage from Home, the protagonist tries returning home but finds it challenging to reconcile with his father whom he had rebelled against. The teenager eventually finds his own way thinking, “Now there would only be life as it came and the excuses one made to himself for accepting it.”
Rosenfeld’s headstone is a large book carved out of red granite. Engraved on the front is “Writer” and “His Work Lives.” His last journal entry, includes these words: “…the source of creativity is the desire to reach over one’s death.”
Resources: Death in a Furnished Room: Rereading Isaac Rosenfeld’s Obituaries, Haaretz; Rosenfeld Rosenfeld by Jim Baird; Rosenfeld Rosenfeld by Mark Shechner; Jewish Book Council; The New York Review; Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing; Rosenfeld, Rosenfeld. Papers, University of Chicago Library; Yale University Press