Upon entering public school at age 12, she was placed in classes with first graders hindered because of language. īel Kaufman first began learning English after her arrival in the United States but it was hard for her. Her mother initially composed in Russian but went on to write sketches and stories in Yiddish that were published regularly for many years in the Jewish Daily Forward ( Forverts), and she also translated some of Bel's grandfather (Sholem Aleichem)'s works from Yiddish into Russian. She and her family lived in Newark, New Jersey, where her father practiced medicine until his death in 1938.

Kaufman emigrated to the United States in 1922 at age 12 with her parents. 'People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.' 'Dead bodies were frozen in peculiar positions on the street,' she recalled. As a child, she published her first poem, 'Spring', in an Odessa magazine. Bel's native language was Russian, and she was raised in Odesa and Kyiv (in present-day Ukraine). Her brother Sherwin, born nine years later, was a New York City physician. Her father eventually became a physician, and her mother, the second-oldest daughter of famed Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, later established herself as a writer under the name Lala Kaufman. The family subsequently returned to Russia where her father completed his studies. Bella Kaufman was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1911, where her father was studying medicine. Koyfman) and her mother, Lala (Lyalya) Kaufman (née Rabinowitz) were both from Russia and married in 1909.

Early life īella's father, Michael Kaufman (Mikhail Y. Sydney Goldstine (1936-1961 divorced), Sidney Gluck (? - 2014 her death)īella Kaufman (– July 25, 2014) was an American teacher and author, well known for writing the bestselling 1964 novel Up the Down Staircase.

Up the down staircase author