During last Tuesday evening’s lecture at Russell House, Steven J. Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland professor for Jewish Studies at Stanford University, decided to try something new. He gave a story-like reading of his biography of the late Jewish-American writer Isaac Rosenfeld.
“It’s a written book,” Zipperstein said. “In other words, it became clear to me that to write about a writer’s life, especially the life of a writer whose work is not widely known, it was critical to engage in it as a writer.”
In his soon-to-be published book, “I Have Not Told Half of What I Saw: On Reading Isaac Rosenfeld,” Zipperstein details not only Rosenfeld’s journey, but also his own. Written in the first person, he describes the process of gathering information and letters of and to Rosenfeld, both poignantly and with humor. The event itself had more the feel of a literary reading, as Zipperstein read passages from the book’s introduction, first chapter, and postscript.
“I concentrated on the parts of the book that really explore the origins of my own engagement,” he said.
According to Zipperstein, part of the motivation in giving an untraditional reading was the University’s reputation.
“I consciously agreed to do it here, being a liberal arts college, though I understand Wesleyan is trying to redefine itself in science,” he said. “But as a college I’ve always thought of it as a liberal arts college, known as somewhat unorthodox and open to all kinds of ideas, so it just seemed like a good place to try this, something I’ve never tried before.”
Zipperstein described Isaac Rosenfeld as bookish and bohemian, yet unable to enjoy said kind of free life. He proposed that Rosenfeld’s life is an example of the randomness and cruelty of a writer’s life, a cautionary tale even.
“He knew well, too well, how excruciating it is to get things right on the page,” Zipperstein said.
His biography deals heavily with Rosenfeld’s personal alienation and the unfortunate brevity of his life. He died of a heart attack in 1956, at the age of 38.
“I started it and wrote several hundred pages of it as a literary biography, but I came to learn that it was more than standard reflection on an important writer’s stance on what it meant to be immersed in and also deeply suspicious of a life given entirely to books,” Zipperstein said. “That Rosenfeld never resolved this tension is no doubt of far less significance than that he faced it, hell, that he wrote about it with skill, with willingness to be ridiculed, with grace, with beauty and genius.”
One work that Zipperstein spoke of in detail is Rosenfeld’s and, to a lesser part Saul Bellow’s, translation to Yiddish of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Intended to credit Eliot as a poet yet discredit him as an anti-Semite, Rosenfeld and Bellow’s translation is much more satire than an actual attempt to channel Eliot’s words. Zipperstein read their version both in Yiddish and translated back into English.
“Let us go through streets that twist and stub like a rabbi’s beard,” he excerpted. “Let us open the door to the room with the wives speaking of Karl Marx and Lenin. I grow old, I grow old, and my navel grows cold.”
Rosenfeld and Bellow were close friends, and although Bellow insisted Rosenfeld was the better writer long after he died, Bellow was much more successful.
“Part of what came to interest me about [Rosenfeld] is that looking at him is seeing the intersection of fame and oblivion,” Zipperstein said.
Zipperstein suggested that Bellow had a sort of survivor’s guilt, and that the relationship between Bellow and Rosenfeld was filled with complex feelings of friendship, competition, and inferiority.
“The very first thing that Bellow said to a very close friend after he won the [Nobel] prize is, ‘It should have been Isaac.’” Zipperstein said. “Now what that means, I’m not sure.”
“I thought [the reading] was interesting because I knew [Zipperstein] was a historian, and so I had come expecting yet another history lecture,” said ITS Desktop Support Specialist Shawn Hill. “It was very different than what I expected.”
Hans-Georg Bartmann, an international student from Germany, also enjoyed the literary format of the lecture and book.
“Life itself just writes the best stories,” Bartmann said.
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