The Situation of the Jewish Writer

Isaac Rosenfeld was born in Chicago, where he attended high school and college with novelist Saul Bellow. Rosenfeld studied philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1933 and in 1941 moved to New York, where he wrote dynamic reviews, poems, and short stories for The Nation, Partisan Review, and New Republic. Rosenfeld was acclaimed as the voice of a new generation of American Jews, but he died of a massive heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. His only novel, Passage from Home, was published in 1946, and he himself was the inspiration for the character Dahfu in Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.