Inbetween, Then on to Bennington College

(by Joseph Kaufman)

And so in 1975, after two years at the University of Vermont, my close friend transferred to Vassar and I took a year off and flew to Israel. I lived on two kibbutzim, Ein Charod M’euchad and Gevulot, where I drove tractors in orange groves and stamped sun-warmed cotton in big steel-mesh containers in Jordan valley dusks.
I remember warm gin-and tonics at a dusty truck stop, remarkable peanuts-in-the-shell at the Afula bus station, the blue, car-mechanic-like uniforms of the kibbutz volunteers, the simple, starchy food, the freezing winter nights, the Israelis’ barking hospitality, and how one person mooned the entire ulpan class as he spoke to the unawares Hebrew teacher.

Post-kibbutz, I traveled to Greece and then Spain and flew home and spent the summer working as a cook at the now-defunct Grossinger’s. I recall the short Jewish maitre d’ with the grim visage of an executioner, the unflappable Chinese cooks who knew the laws of kashrut, the elegant black waiter, Tony G., who drove a Thunderbird and could carry forty mains stacked on a tray on his fingertips, the late-night, cigarette-and-scotch deluged, high-stakes Puerto Rican poker games, the college waiters and waitresses, the French sou-chefs, the seersucker suit that I wore in my off hours that made me look, in retrospect, like a popsicle salesman. And I can picture the scads of overweight guests—for what did one do in the Borscht Belt in those days except eat?—the bad comedians (the only thing sadder than a bad comedian is two of them), the over-cheerful entertainment aides, the kitschy entertainment director himself who was ‘world famous’ for his comedic rendition of ‘Simon Says.’ As well, there was an every-other-day diving show at the main pool where a girl and boy from the University of Michigan diving team did fancy aerial twists and somersaults. It was impressive to see such athleticism so close-up and I got a crush on the girl, naturally, and in order to meet her I asked the pair of them to teach me how to dive. Which ended up being the scariest thing I’d ever done up until that time.

In the fall of 1976, my brother-in-law of the time and sister drove me to Bennington College, a campus of white clapboard houses set in rural Vermont. The college had gone co-ed only seven years before and there were 450 women and approximately 150 men. There was a strong air of women’s lib washing through the performance halls and dining rooms and louche morals and intense, self-absorbed creativity. The girls were pretty, studiously unimpressed by men, affairs between student and faculty members were encouraged, the food, as they say in Pittsfield, was good enough for government work, and there was a decent pool table in the student café. It was disconcerting at first to share a bathroom with three women, but after so much traveling and working, the prospect of writing with Bernard Malamud in the college’s tranquil but charged atmosphere, not to mention the other fascinating courses and array of talented people, seemed perfect to me. I’d not been around such a community of people, where hard creative work was the air that one breathed. And it was this seriousness about one’s development as an artist which was so enticing, something which I’d never encountered before.