Writer Bel Kaufman dies at 103
NEW YORK — Bel Kaufman, the witty and spirited fiction writer, educator and storyteller whose million-selling “Up the Down Staircase” captured the insanity and the humor, the pathos and the poetry of the American high school, died Friday at age 103.
Kaufman, the granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem and a vital link to Yiddish culture, died at her Manhattan home after a brief illness, said her daughter, Thea Goldstine.
Kaufman was a middle-age teacher and single mother in the mid-1960s when her autobiographical novel was welcomed as a kind of civilian companion to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” a send-up of the most maddening bureaucracy. Like “Catch-22,” even the title of Kaufman’s book became a tell-all label, shorthand for all the senseless rules students and educators could never quite follow.
“Up the Down Staircase,” a scrapbook of letters, notes and memos, follows a few months in the life of the idealistic young Sylvia Barrett, the new teacher at Calvin Coolidge High School. She is a kind soul staggering under a blizzard of administrative nonsense and student impudence. When she’s not being reprimanded, she faces a crowded but endearing class of misfits, from rebel Joe Ferone to the brown-nosing Harry A. Kagan.
