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 [...]

Early Literary Influences

(by Joseph Kaufman)
The Pittsfield, Massachusetts of the sixties that I grew up in was a blue-collar enclave of Catholics and Protestants. It was hardly a literary hotbed though Normal Mailer lived for a while in Stockbridge and William Shirer in Lenox. Historically, in the late nineteenth century, Hawthorne and Melville resided collegially in the Berkshires, [...]

How I Didn’t Go To Woodstock

(From Joseph Kaufman)
The roots of The Legend of Cosmo & the Archangel took place in August, 1969. I was 13 and a junior counselor at a day camp for boys called Camp Sumner, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Sumner was an old camp, my father as a boy had gone there before me, and it was located [...]

Joseph Kaufman “Roots”

My sisters would wear their best dress coats and I would brush my hair and wear a tie when my mother’s parents, wealthy Jews from the City, neighbors of Marlene Dietrich on east 52nd street, sent a limousine to Pittsfield to gather us up. We were the country bumpkins of the family, exiled to the [...]