Bel Kaufman

Bel Kaufman (1911–2014) was a writer and teacher. She was born in Berlin, the granddaughter of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, and initially grew up in Odessa before her family emigrated to the United States in 1922. After studying at Hunter College and Columbia University, she worked as a teacher. She became best known for her novel “Up the Down Staircase” (1964), which portrays life in an American school. At the age of seven, she had already published a poem in a newspaper in Odessa.