The writer Isaac Rosenfeld (1918-56) seemed to his friend Saul Bellow like a Russian-Jewish intellectual; to Alfred Kazin, he appeared “as Old World as our fathers.” But in fact he was an American, Chicago-born, who studied philosophy at the University of Chicago in the Thirties, came to New York in 1941, joined the famous circle of Partisan Review, Commentary, and New Republic writers, and died in Chicago at the age of thirty-eight. He is one of the more obscure members of the group known as the New York intellectuals, but he was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant.

Mark Shechner, an English professor at SUNY Buffalo, has edited a collection of Rosenfeld’s work chosen from a book of essays (An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties, 1962), a volume of stories (Alpha and Omega, 1966), and selections from Rosenfeld’s journals. Mr. Shechner’s curious title, Preserving the Hunger, comes from one of Rosenfeld’s most astute reviews, of Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, in which he argues that both the Jewish and the American soul are afflicted with an unappeasable metaphysical hunger, a permanent yearning. 

Rosenfeld argues that to a Jew, the satisfaction of hunger is a substitute for other, never-to-be-satisfied hungers.

Hunger—the baser, stomach-rumbling kind—is also the subject of Rosenfeld’s famous essay entitled “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street” (1949), a gleefully naughty but penetrating discussion of Jewish food and sex taboos that