Bel Kaufman
The mid-twentieth century in American literature saw a sustained effort to render institutional life — schools, bureaucracies, the daily rhythms of public work — as fit material for fiction. Bel Kaufman, born in Berlin on May 10, 1911, became one of the writers who brought that effort to bear on the American classroom.
Kaufman worked as both a secondary school teacher and a university teacher, roles that ran alongside her life as a novelist and author. She was educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, and she wrote in English — as well as in Yiddish and Russian — as a citizen of the United States who had begun her life in Europe. She is noted for the novel Up the Down Staircase, which stands as the central work of her writing career.
As both practitioner and writer, Kaufman occupied a position that resisted easy categorization. She brought to her fiction a direct knowledge of the institutions she depicted, and Up the Down Staircase gave that knowledge a novelistic shape. Her multilingualism — English, Yiddish, Russian — points to the breadth of the cultural world she inhabited, one that stretched well beyond the American public school system she wrote about.
Kaufman received an award from the Anti-Defamation League, a recognition that situated her work within a wider civic and cultural conversation. She died on July 25, 2014, in Manhattan, New York City, having lived through a remarkable span of American literary and social history. The Anti-Defamation League honor remains among the documented markers of the reception her work earned during her lifetime.
Quotes by Bel Kaufman
Her disappointment was minor compared to her astonishment. “Again I didn’t win? But last year I didn’t win also!
After the prescribed length of time and number of meals consumed and digested in unison, they felt they had sufficient community of interests to marry.
There is a need for closeness, yet we can’t get too close. The teacher-pupil relationship is a kind of tightrope to be walked. I know how carefully I must choose a word, a gesture. I understand the delicate balance between friendliness and familiarity, dignity and aloofness.
Mr. Philpotts, did you enjoy your life?” “Why, no, I wouldn’t say – ” “How then,” asked the chief, “do you expect to enjoy your afterlife? What do you know of happiness? What experience have you had in that line?
In August they had a bad fright. Her lawyer had suggested that – in view of the circumstances – they drop the divorce. This filled them both with profound dread; at the thought of staying married, of sinking back into the deadly boredom of their pre-divorce days, they felt nothing but horror. They realized more than ever that marriage for them was unthinkable.
I don’t lose time playing verbal games, trying to remember what I forgot. “I don’t remember your name,” says one octogenarian to another. “Tell me what it is.” The second one pauses: “How soon do you have to know?” he asks.
Without love, the art of love is mere acrobatics. Without love, the art of giving is mere etiquette.
