Not one to give up easily, Kaufman wrote directly to Millay, asking about her interpretation. She went on to get a master’s degree from Columbia University but was turned down for a teaching job in the public schools because she still had traces of a Russian accent.Īfter several tries, she got over that hurdle, only to be rejected because of an interpretation she gave of a poem by Edna St. But she quickly advanced and in 1934 graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College. Doesn’t every child step over dead bodies? I didn’t know any different.”Īrriving in the United States in 1923, Kaufman was plunged into the school system without knowing English.
“But a child has no basis for comparison. “Dead bodies were frozen in peculiar positions on the street,” she recalled in a 2011 New York Times interview. Kaufman grew up amid unrest and then revolution in Russia. Her father was a physician and her mother a writer. She was born Belle Kaufman on May 10, 1911, in Berlin, but grew up in Odessa and Kiev in what is now Ukraine. Back then, she told the New York Times in 2004, “Schools were a haven from what was happening outside.
Kaufman recognized that conditions in many urban schools had gotten significantly worse since she wrote the novel. It was made into a 1967 movie with Sandy Dennis as Sylvia. The book was on bestseller lists for more than a year and translated into numerous languages. The title came from a memo by a school official in the book who wrote that a student was being disciplined for walking up a staircase that was designated for downward travel.
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