Up the Down Staircase (1965) - Bel Kaufman

Written by Bel Kaufman
Read by Barbara Rosenblat
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: April 15, 2014
Duration: 08:56:29

Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase is one of the best-loved novels of our time. It has been translated into sixteen languages, made into a prizewinning motion picture, and staged as a play at high schools all over the United States; its very title has become part of the American idiom.

Never before had a novel so compellingly laid bare the inner workings of a metropolitan high school. Up the Down Staircase is the funny and touching story of a committed, idealistic teacher whose clash with school bureaucracy is a timeless lesson for students, teachers, parents—anyone concerned about public education. Bel Kaufman lets her characters speak for themselves through memos, letters, directives from the principal, comments by students, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, evoking a vivid picture of teachers fighting the good fight against all that stands in the way of good teaching.

Part of a review from The New Yorker Magazine…”I grabbed a copy from the library, and as I plunged into it I realized just how sadly appropriate it was that the book had fallen into obsolescence. What place can there be for a book about the large struggles and little glories of a teacher, at a time when teacher bashing has become a major strain, even the dominant strain, of what passes for “education reform”?

There is no small amount of autobiography in “Up the Down Staircase.” Kaufman was the granddaughter of the renowned Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, whose Tevye stories inspired “Fiddler on the Roof.” She came to America as a twelve-year-old immigrant from Russia, and, like many Jewish immigrants, she used public school as a ladder of upward mobility and Americanization. And, like so many Jewish women of her era, she then became a teacher herself. She ultimately spent about thirty years in New York’s public schools, and those experiences deeply informed “Up the Down Staircase.”

I also read it as a young teacher……J