Teacher, Up the Down Staircase author
NEW YORK — Bel Kaufman, the witty and spirited fiction writer, educator and storyteller whose million-selling Up the Down Staircase captured the experience of the American high school, died Friday at age 103.
Kaufman, the granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, 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 has since sold more than 6 million copies and has been translated into 16 languages.
She was born Bella Kaufman in Berlin and raised in Odessa, Ukraine. Her first language was Russian. Her family fled in 1923 to escape the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and she arrived in the U.S., at age 11, speaking no English. The kindness of her teacher inspired her to become an educator, too.
Language was a temporary handicap. She caught up quickly, graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College in 1934 and received a master’s degree in English from Columbia University two years later. Around the same time, she married Sidney Goldstine, with whom she had two children.
After leaving Columbia, Bella Kaufman wrote short fiction, including La Tigresse, published in Esquire with a small but lasting revision: Kaufman shortened her first name to Bel because the magazine only accepted work by men.
During the 1950s and into the ’60s, until her writing career took off, she taught in high schools and community colleges. After Staircase, she wrote a second novel, Love, Etc., and was a popular lecturer and speaker, talking about schools, the arts and her famous grandfather.