Bel Kaufman

Personal

Born Belle Kaufman, 1911, in Berlin, Germany; immigrated to Russia; immigrated to United States, c. 1923; daughter of Michael J. (a physician) and Lola (a writer; maiden name, Rabinowitz) Kaufman; married second husband; children: (first marriage) Jonathan Goldstine, Thea Goldstine. Education: Hunter College (now Hunter College of the City University of New York), B.A. (magna cum laude), 1934; Columbia University, M.A. (with highest honors). Hobbies and other interests: Travel, bicycling, doodling, writing funny verses.

Addresses

Home—1020 Park Ave., New York, NY 10028-0913. Agent—Authors Unlimited, 31 East 32nd St., Suite 300, New York, NY 10016. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Taught in New York City high schools for twenty years; New School for Social Research (now New School University), New York, NY, instructor in English, 1964; Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, NY, assistant professor of English, beginning 1964; City University of New York, adjunct professor of English. Taught fiction workshops at University of Rochester and University of Florida. Member of Advisory Commission of Performing Arts; member of board of directors, Shalom Aleichem Foundation; member of advisory council, Town Hall Foundation.

Member

Authors League of America (member of executive board), PEN (member of executive board), Dramatists Guild, Phi Beta Kappa, English Graduate Union (Columbia University).

Awards, Honors

Plaques from Anti-Defamation League and United Jewish Appeal; LL.D., Nasson College, 1965; Paperback of the Year Award for fiction, National Bestsellers Institute, 1966, for Up the Down Staircase; named to Hall of Fame, Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1973; National Human Resource award, 1974; Educational Association of America Award for best article on education, 1976, and 1979; named Woman of the Year, Organization for Rehabilitation through Training, 1980, and Brandeis University, 1980, 1981; National Education Association/PEN short story contest winner, 1983, for "Sunday in the Park"; D.H.L., Hunter College, 2001; Kentucky Colonel Award.

Writings

Up the Down Staircase, Prentice-Hall (New York, NY), 1965.

Love, Etc., Prentice-Hall (New York, NY), 1979.

Also author of lyrics for musicals. Contributor to Odessa Memories, edited by Nicolas Iljine, University of Washington Press, 2004. Contributor of short stories and articles to periodicals, including Esquire, Saturday Review, Today's Education, McCall's, and New York Times.

Up the Down Staircase has been published in sixteen languages, including Russian, Korean, Spanish, and Swedish.

Adaptations

Up the Down Staircase was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1967, and adapted for the stage by Christopher Sergel and published by Dramatic Publishing (Woodstock, IL), 1969.

Sidelights

Her twenty-year teaching career in New York City provided Bel Kaufman with insights that she incorporated into her first novel, Up the Down Staircase, the story of a young English instructor's introduction to the frenetic, often dangerous world of a modern big-city high school. A satiric look at the inefficiencies of school bureaucracy, the popular novel inspired both film and stage versions. Kaufman is also the author of Love, Etc., a novel about a middle-aged woman finding romance.

A Tumultuous Childhood

Kaufman was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1911, but her family soon moved to the Russian city of Odessa to be with relatives. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the resulting civil war brought violence and widespread anti-Semitism. "We lived in peril, since we were the enemy bourgeois, with our own house and servants and possessions," Kaufman explained in an essay in Odessa Memories. The family was attacked: "Soldiers burst into our house,… breaking things, taking things, shouting, and shooting." In 1923 the family decided to leave for the United States, but travel was restricted under the new communist government. Fortunately, the Kaufmans ultimately escaped because of the continuing popularity of Kaufman's late grandfather, Sholem Aleichem. A famed Yiddish humorist, Aleichem was the author of the stories of Jewish peasant life in Russia that were later adapted as the hit musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. As Kaufman recounted in Odessa Memories: "Several of my father's colleagues, bourgeois like us, were jailed or shot trying to cross the border. But Sholem Aleichem, posthumously, saved us. Even in the worst of times in Russia, he was translated, published, read widely, and cherished. We went to Moscow, where my mother managed to see Lunacharsky, the Minister of Culture. As Sholem Aleichem's daughter, she requested permission to go with her husband, daughter, and small son to visit her widowed mother in New York. Permission was granted, and we left in style, legally and safely." Kaufman would not return to Odessa for forty-five years.

Kaufman's grandfather had died in 1916, when she was a little girl, but she retains the memory of a letter he wrote to her: "I'm writing you in the hope that you will grow up and learn to write so that you can write me letters." She credits that letter with inspiring her to become a writer in later life. Kaufman was also inspired by her mother, who contributed columns to the Yiddish-language publication Forverts.

Life as a new immigrant in New York City was difficult for Kaufman, who spoke halting English with a thick Russian accent. Even though she was twelve years old when her family came to America, she was placed in first grade because of her inability to understand what was being said to her, and this experience pushed her to learn English quickly. "I learned because I had to learn," she told Lenore Skenazy in the New York Daily News. She later took speech courses to develop a more American-sounding accent.

Kaufman attended Hunter College in New York City, where she joined a friend in a teacher-training class that changed her life. Seeing the eager expressions on the children's faces, Kaufman decided that teaching was what she wanted to do. She went on to earn a master's degree from Columbia University before beginning a career as a teacher in the New York City school system. "When a child who never spoke up raises a halting hand, when a kid's face lights up and says, 'I get it!'—it's a kind of immortality," she told Joyce Purnick in the New York Times.

While pursuing her teaching career, Kaufman also wrote and published short stories in such magazines as the Saturday Review and Esquire. Because

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the men's magazine Esquire had a policy in the early 1940s not to publish fiction by women, Kaufman submitted her stories as "Bel" Kaufman, making her name appear to be more masculine. She has used that version of her name on her subsequent writing as well.

A Novel Is Born

When a magazine editor suggested that one of her short stories about teaching school could be turned into a book, Kaufman began writing Up the Down Staircase. The book's title is taken from a note written by a school administrator that excused a student for being late to class because he had been caught going up the down staircase and had been detained. It was typical of the sort of bureaucratic nonsense Kaufman documents in her novel. According to Commonweal critic David Lodge, "It's a good title, conveying a sense of both the anarchic world the heroine inhabits, and of the bureaucratic interference which makes it well-nigh impossible for her to cultivate any true educational order."

The story tells of young Sylvia Barrett, who begins her teaching career in an inner-city school in a room with a broken window and not enough chairs. As her first term progresses, she is faced with a desk without drawers, kids who do not really understand or care about what she is teaching, and a fellow teacher who woos her with poetry. The kids in the novel, Skenazy explained, "are snotty, cynical and scary. Some are homeless, some have rap sheets, one threatens his teacher with rape. And yet that teacher—Bel's alter-ego—manages to get through to most of them with her sincerity and spunk." When Sylvia receives an offer to teach at a college, she must decide whether to leave the children she has finally reached or move on to a more stable teaching environment.

Kaufman's protagonist's story is told in a nonlinear manner. As Lodge explained: "There is no narrative in the conventional sense; instead, rather in the style of pop art, we get a montage of letters, notes, circulars and memoranda, pupils' compositions, suggestions, work-books and drawings, lesson-plans, committee minutes, extracts from the school paper and blackboard inscriptions." The novel especially shows the overwhelming interference teachers often face from the school administration. Excessive paperwork, contradictory orders, and indecipherable instructions are what Sylvia must endure on a daily basis.

Critical praise for Kaufman's first novel was immediate. Catherine Gause wrote in America: "I loved it…. I chuckled, I roared. I wept. It became a part of me. [Up the Down Staircase] is a must for teachers and a revelation for the outside world, for unbelievers or the uninitiated, who do not know that this profession … is a 24-hour job all 365 days a year." Up the Down Staircase sold a notable 1,500,000 copies in its first month of publication. It also remained on the bestseller lists for sixty-four weeks and was the number-one book in the nation for five months, leading a Time writer to label Kaufman's story "easily the most popular novel about U.S. public schools in history." Joan Baum, writing for Education Update Online called the novel a "hilarious and poignant memoir of teaching English in an inner-city high school." Speaking to Adam Langer in Book about the success Up the Down Staircase has enjoyed, Kaufman remarked: "It's a staircase that never seems to rust."

If you enjoy the works of Bel Kaufman

If you enjoy the works of Bel Kaufman, you may also want to check out the following books:

Tracy Kidder, Among Schoolchildren, 1989.

Esmé Raji Codell, Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher's First Year, 1999.

Brendan Halpin, Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story, 2003.

Kaufman produced her second novel, Love, Etc., some fourteen years after Up the Down Staircase was published. She told Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times Book Review that the reason for the long delay between books was that in the case of Love, Etc. "I could not find the right form to fit the content. What I needed was a way of combining seriousness and humor—laughter behind tears, tears behind laughter." The resulting novel, Kaufman continued, "on one level, [is] about a mature woman novelist's romantic, passionate, intense love affair with a bizarre, enigmatic man … [and] on another level [is] an exploration of the writer's transmuting experience into fictional art."

A popular speaker at schools, conferences, and colleges, Kaufman does not so much give a lecture as have a "direct, informal, unmediated conversation with her audience," according to Baum. She enjoys speaking about the value of humor in helping people survive tough situations. And she often speaks of her grandfather, Aleichem, whom she refers to affectionately as "Papa." These talks include her own remembrances of him, bits from his stories, and even some of the jokes he told. Every year on Aleichem's birthday, in accordance with his deathbed wish, admirers of his writings gather at a New York synagogue to remember him by reading from his work and sharing laughter.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

America, February 6, 1965, Catherine Gause, review of Up the Down Staircase.

Book, July-August, 2003, Adam Langer, "Where Are They Now?," p. 34.

Chicago Tribune Book World, October 28, 1979.

Choice, March, 1965, review of Up the Down Staircase, p. 22.

Commonweal, May 14, 1965, David Lodge, review of Up the Down Staircase, p. 112.

English Language Notes, September, 1992, Ronald J. Nelson, "The Battlefield in Bel Kaufman's 'Sunday in the Park,'" pp. 61-68.

Life, September 3, 1965, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., review of Up the Down Staircase, p. 9.

National Observer, March 29, 1965, Bill Ward, review of Up the Down Staircase, p. 19.

New York Daily News, January 24, 2001, Lenore Skenazy, "Still Going Up the Down Staircase."

New York Review of Books, July 7, 1966, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, review of Up the Down Staircase.

New York Times, December 16, 1964, p. 40; April 26, 2004, Joyce Purnick, "Looking Back on Writing and Staircases," p. B1.

New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1965, Beverly Grunwald, review of Up the Down Staircase; June 29, 1979; October 21, 1979.

Reporter, January 1, 1965, Dan Pinck, review of Up the Down Staircase, p. 46.

Saturday Review, March 20, 1965, Paul Woodring, review of Up the Down Staircase, p. 71.

Teachers College Record, May, 1965, Robert Bone, review of Up the Down Staircase, p. 77.

Time, February 12, 1965.

Washington Post Book World, November 11, 1979.

ONLINE

All about Jewish Theater, http://www.jewish-theater.com/ (May 9, 2005), Bel Kaufman, "Sholem Aleichem's Granddaughter Bel Kaufman Remembers Him."

EducationUpdate.com, http://www.educationupdate.com/ (November 2, 2002), Joan Baum, "Bel Kaufman Captivates Audience at Marymount Manhattan College."