The trajectory of Isaac Rosenfeld's life (1918–1956) and work is aptly summarized in the subtitle of Steven Zipperstein's biography: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing. Rosenfeld is perhaps best remembered as the writer of squandered talent, the lifelong friend and rival of Saul Bellow, the intellectual who never quite lived up to his early promise, or, if the fates are kind, as the author of the autobiographical novel, Passage from Home, and an impressive number of critical essays. He is equally famous for having died tragically young, of a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, suddenly, some would say mysteriously, alone and at his desk. (In what Zipperstein calls “a cruel, patently absurd” statement, Alfred Kazin wrote “Even his dying would be a … failure.”) With this biography, Rosenfeld is finally rescued from the head-wagging regret with which his name is usually associated. More than an examination of the life and work of its subject, and certainly more than an attempt to make more of the man than his legacy warrants, Rosenfeld's Lives illuminates what it must have been like to be a young Jewish intellectual of that time and place and to live a life fervently devoted to books and ideas.

While concluding that Rosenfeld was on a path that held more personal and professional potential near the end of his life, Zipperstein makes clear that the challenge of his study is to figure out “how to write about failure.” He writes with passion for his subject, and with enormous sympathy not only for Rosenfeld's life and work, but also for the lives of the scores of people who knew him, wrote about him, and spoke frankly about him. The author of a biography of Aḥad Ha'am and important studies of Russian Jewry, Zipperstein also writes quite personally about the intrusive nature of biography, the people he met, liked, and disliked in the course of his research, the importance of friendships and love, what it means to live in and with books, and the torments and pleasures of writing.

A follower of the bizarre psychiatric theories of William Reich, Rosenfeld spent more time seeking enlightenment and sexual fulfillment in his orgone box than his readers, friends, and lovers might have wished. He lived a rather dissolute life, unable to stay at a job or career, to be a consistent presence in the lives of his two children, to clean up his life or his apartment. But he did manage to write and to be written about. Zipperstein liberally quotes Jewish American luminaries who were Isaac's close friends and wrote a number of memorable statements about him, many—but by no means all—of them kinder than Kazin's. He recalls Kazin's memory of Isaac sitting in that orgone box “as if he were waiting for a telephone call that was not coming through.” Upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bellow is famously reported to have said of his friend, who had died two decades earlier: “It should have been Isaac.” Irving Howe called him “our golden boy,” but also described him as a “wunderkind grown into tubby sage.” In his novel, To An Early Grave, Wallace Markfield referred to Rosenfeld as a “secondary talent of the highest order,” and wrote that “he peed in sinks. … He sat in the toilet for three hours at a time. … He farted away golden opportunities.” (Zipperstein refrains from commenting on whether this says more about Rosenfeld or about Markfield's scatological imagination.)

In every aspect of his personal, philosophical, and literary being, Rosenfeld was obsessed with “the mind-body problem.” How could orgasmic ecstasy free him from the constraints of the mind? How could the restraints of the physical world be transcended? How could one overcome the alienation from both mind and body that was so much a part of the modern human condition? It is no surprise that he could never answer these questions, but it is surely significant that he continued to try. Whether the Jewish Question supplanted these other questions, led to them, or was itself a response to them may be a matter for debate, but that Rosenfeld was equally concerned with the fate of the Jews is indisputable. Reichianism, sex, and the body offered clearer answers than the politics and history of the twentieth century or the history of the Jews. Eventually, Rosenfeld was so understandably terrified by what World War II revealed about humanity that he came to doubt the possibility of meaningful intellectual or physical achievement. Neither orgasmic nor mental energy could lead to anything like an adequate response to that horror.

Rosenfeld's views of Judaism and the Jews could sometimes appear as idiosyncratic and weird as his orgone box. The most notorious of his published statements about Jews appeared in a 1949 Commentary article entitled “Adam and Eve on Delancey,” in which he offered a pseudo-Freudian insight into the laws of kashrut. He linked them to what he saw as the sexually repressive nature of Judaism, which he understood as stemming from the need to keep things—meat and milk, the holy and profane, Jew and non-Jew, and, finally, man and woman—from touching or being contaminated by one another. Rejection of what he understood as this fundamental Jewish taboo was surely another impetus in his turn to Reich. Although his comprehension of Jewish law and religious teachings may have been sketchy, his knowledge of Yiddish culture and texts was formidable. He attended a Sholem Aleichem shule in Chicago. His first published story (at the age of fourteen) was in Yiddish. He and Saul Bellow (but mostly he) wrote a brilliant, scathing Yiddish parody of T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that was memorized and declaimed by friends and admirers for decades. His literary influences were primarily Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz. He mourned the lack of a cohesive yidish—in the (Yiddish language) sense of Jewish and Yiddish—community. And he continued to publish in his two mother tongues through most of his short life.

Rosenfeld was an indisputably important cultural figure, a kind of Jewish every-alienated-man. He was, by all accounts, a charming man, sometimes inspired and often confused, given to psychoanalytic musings, to physical excess. He wrote a number of important works and thought deeply and wrote compellingly about many of the century's defining matters, including the most fundamental ones concerning Jewish and American culture and modernity. In the end, Zipperstein does not offer an argument on behalf of the literary importance or excellence of Rosenfeld's work. That, indeed, is one of the strengths of this unapologetic study of a man for whom he has obvious sympathy, admiration, even affection. Speculating about what Rosenfeld might have accomplished had he lived longer, or what he might have written had he lived differently, is a tempting though futile exercise. Rosenfeld's Lives offers, instead, an analysis of the man and his work that is—like its eponymous subject when he was at his best—intimate and scholarly, full of private musings, and fascinated by and insightful about some of the most famous people and texts of the twentieth century.