The Day My Mother Cried and Other Stories: and Other Stories

Who I Am

1 Who I Am William D. Kaufman was born on November 6, 1914, and according to my father it was one of the luckiest days of his life. Actually, his good luck had nothing to do with my birth. It had everything to do with cabbages. My father was a huckster of fruits and vegetables who plied his trade from a horse and wagon. The day I was born cabbage was king. It was at its zenith. It was ripe for conversion into its alter ego—sauerkraut . My father’s customers were the Russian and Polish coal miners who lived in the villages and townships surrounding our city where anthracite coal was mined. One of the staple foods on almost every miner’s year-round table was sauerkraut. The finely cut up and fermented cabbage is allowed to sour and age in large wooden kegs or barrels. My father had dozens of customers waiting for the delivery of cabbage. Price was no object and my father reaped profits that were unprecedented and, I think, sinful. As long as he lived, my father viewed me as the harbinger of good luck. I started school at five and stayed with it for the next eighteen years. It was the usual curriculum vitae—kindergarten through four years of college and a year of grad school. Those eighteen years brought mostly good memories. I wrote stories about the pleasant ones and ignored the others. I had just turned four when the first world war ended. I described the joy and jubilation of the day on our street and synagogue. I also wrote about my friendship with a Civil War veteran who visited our 2 | William D. Kaufman school before Memorial Day when I was in sixth grade. He told us how he lost his arm in the Battle of Bull Run and that he shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln in the field hospital at Gettysburg and that “the president cried.” At thirteen I was bar mitzvah, which was notable only because I delivered two speeches, one in Yiddish in the synagogue and the other in English in the banquet hall. At fourteen I entered high school and chose Latin as my foreign language. Almost at the opening bell I fell in love with the Latin teacher who was as pretty as Clara Bow and probably a helluva lot smarter. We called her “Miss Portia.” In my junior year my parents transferred me to the yeshiva in New York City which was one of the lesser delights of my life. At the yeshiva I was never a very distinguished student, especially in Talmudic studies . My father and my mother, too, expected that I would become a rabbi, which I knew would never happen. I did not have the heart to tell them and when I did, shortly before my graduation, my father was shocked and my mother cried. I was sports editor of Yeshiva College weekly newspaper and began to write some pretty solid articles. At the yeshiva, there were only two competitive sports—basketball and chess. I began to write a Walter Winchell kind of column, which made me a man to be feared and avoided though that never happened. After graduation I applied to the Columbia University School of Journalism and because their quota of applicants for the year was filled I was given a provisional acceptance for the following year. That middle year I enrolled for two courses at NYU in reporting and feature writing. I won a medal in reporting and an honorable mention in feature writing. I was ready for Columbia. My year at Columbia was one of the festive years of my life. Ours was a class of sixty students, most of whom were in the top echelons of their colleges. Among them were graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton , Vassar, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. Registered with us was a priest, an ex-managing editor of a popular magazine, a German lady who was a little older than most of us and was rumored to be a baroness, two reporters for the New York Times and “schleppers” like me who were ready to try the waters. Who I Am | 3 The year passed much too fast, at least for me, and when it ended I was ready to take on a job as a news reporter, an editor, a researcher, a writer of editorials, and...