Angst (from the diary of Joseph Kaufman)

It is difficult to describe the degree and nature of tension which aggravates the fault line between being a religious man and writer of fiction. Call it a type of existential strife, a goading and constant friction, a frustrating and at times debilitating clash, which leaves neither of these sides of me alone or unharmed. [...]

More Memories of Bernard Malamud

As a senior at Bennington College, I fumbled around for a post-graduation plan which would allow me to write. I observed Mr. Malamud closely then, as if to construct some tableau of sustaining memory of what a real writer looked and acted like before being condemned to real-life writing wilderness: his narrow, almost Arab moustache, [...]

Threes, the Third, at Bennington College

From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman.
It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting [...]

Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman

After Mr. Benson, my 9th grade Marine writing teacher, I had no writing teacher for the rest of high school—there simply were no creative writing classes at Pittsfield High School from 1970-1973. Rather, in English class, we read Dickens and Twain and Hawthorne and wrote ten page papers about their significance—I don’t even think I [...]

Reminiscing about Mr. Malamud

(by Joseph Kaufman)
From sleeting March rain to the humid, late-May sun, Mr. Malamud taught his one class a year, ten sessions in all. Some years he taught a course in the short story, replete with reading list and papers to write; other years he taught a writing seminar, the semester’s goal of which was to [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]