The teetotaling tribe’s myth

The memoir of Alan Kaufman, who climbed out of the depths of despair to achieve artistic success.

By MATT NESVISKY
The teetotaling tribe’s myth (photo credit: AVI KATZ)
The teetotaling tribe’s myth
(photo credit: AVI KATZ)
Jews don’t drink, we all know that, just as they can’t abide smoked salmon. Perhaps no one has put to rest the myth of the teetotaling tribe so dramatically as Alan Kaufman, the American-Israeli author of Drunken Angel.
This new 463-page memoir is as hairraising a piece of addiction literature as to be found anywhere. But it’s also a story of heartening triumph. Kaufman, 60, who was essentially blind drunk for fully one third of his life, has been clean and sober for the past two decades – free of alcohol, drugs, even cigarettes, all of which he had consumed with killing abandon.
“Of course, I still go to support-group meetings every day,” Kaufman tells The Jerusalem Report in his sunny San Francisco apartment. “That’s after I say my prayers every morning,” he added, indicating the worn knitted skullcap lying on a pile of books near his writing desk. “And I do my Zen meditation. No one is ever really an ex-alcoholic. The best one can say is he’s in the process of recovery. Even after 20 years.”
Drunken Angel is not the Bronx-born Kaufman’s first foray into autobiography.
He won accolades for his first memoir, Jew Boy (2000) and for an autobiographical novel, Matches (2005), which focused on the author’s service in the ID F. But while Drunken Angel covers much of the same territory as the earlier books, neither details the alcoholism that held the author in its chokehold for so many years.
How corrosive was Kaufman’s drinking? Perhaps no episode, not the lying in the gutters, not the raiding trash cans for food scraps, is as harrowing as the occasion when Kaufman woke up in bed one morning next to a woman he did not know – only to be informed that a few days before he had married her.
Kaufman, who already had a string of short-lived marriages and other relationships behind him, now found himself in the worst of his many predicaments. He and his surprise spouse soon learned to loathe each other – yet their union was to produce a daughter whom Kaufman loved – and from whom he was to be totally estranged for many years. (The daughter, now in her 20s, lives in Israel and has a fond, if sporadic, relationship with her father.)
Lost daughter
That lost daughter was one of the factors that helped pull Kaufman back from the abyss.
Another was the realization that his drinking was destroying him (he tried suicide at least once). A third was the knowledge that his alcoholism was preventing his lifelong ambition to be a writer.
During his drinking years Kaufman did manage periodically to publish some verse, short stories and essays in small publications, but it was only after beginning his journey to recovery that he made it in to the world of mainstream, hardcover respectability.
“Jew Boy has even been optioned for the movies,” he relates, almost sheepishly.
“Drunken Angel has just been released as an audiobook. And I’m hard at work on a new novel, this one based on the life of my mother, who was a French Holocaust survivor.”
(The late Marie Jucht Kaufman, with whom Kaufman had a long love-hate relationship, would frequently beat her young son nearly senseless, a fact that evidently figured in Kaufman’s eventual escape into alcoholism.) Yet even while Kaufman was in the throes of booze he managed to exercise another of his talents, which might be labeled a convener of like-minded artists. Many members of the Anglophone community in Israel will fondly recall the Jerusalem Cricket, a series of “live magazine” evenings at the Israel Museum that Kaufman and his friends presented in the early 1980s. The programs included poetry readings, musical and dance performances, videos and interviews with such luminaries as Yehuda Amichai.
Returning to the US in 1984 after serving in the first Lebanon war, Kaufman began a master’s degree program at New York’s Columbia University. He eventually dropped out, but not before editing an anthology of work culled from leading American university writing programs. Around the same spoken word movement and was soon organizing poetry readings and slams.
Moving to San Francisco in 1990 in the hope of leaving New York and drunkenness behind him, Kaufman quickly became a part of the lively West Coast spoken word movement, performing and organizing programs.
This led to his editing, with S.A. Griffin, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (1999), The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (with Barney Rosset and Neil Ortenberg, 2004), and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays (2006). These were three massive and well-received collections of countercultural writings that range from Walt Whitman on through the Beats, Bob Dylan and today’s rap artists. The anthologies provide an alternative survey of American literature – and indeed a view of an alternative America.
Kaufman also founded a radical Jewish magazine called Davka, which eventually evolved into an on-line publication called Tattoo Jew. Today Kaufman avidly continues his activities as an arts convener, curator and organizer, whether of literary gatherings or art exhibitions (he has been exhibiting his own paintings since 2007). More recently he has been involved in the Free University of San Francisco, which he established with the help of Matt Gonzales, a one-time San Francisco mayoral candidate and Ralph Nader’s presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket.
Free University
“The Free University is exactly what it says” Kaufman remarks. “College-level courses without the crushing college debt. Students don’t pay anything, teachers don’t earn anything.
The New York Times wrote about it, and like everyone else, suggested it couldn’t work. But hundreds turned out for our founding meeting and the university is still going strong. Other cities have contacted us about setting up similar programs. Thanks to Facebook, we’ve heard from about 850 people around the world.”
Despite his decades of drug and alcohol abuse, the tall and rangy Kaufman retains the robust build of the high-school football player he once was. (“I have a strong constitution,” he shrugs.) Equally remarkable is this writer’s devotion to bringing people together and working closely with others; the writer has a penchant for collaboration and cooperation far more common among musicians than among literary types, who are notoriously as jealous as chorus girls.
“It was a hard lesson to learn,” he says, “that some things can’t be done on your own. It’s a matter of putting ego aside. This was true for overcoming my addictions. And it was equally true for realizing my artistic ambitions.”
Kaufman evidently also has a talent for friendship. His autobiographical writings are virtually devoid of negative observations about others, and I’ve found no one who has anything negative to say about Kaufman. He may not be entirely guileless, but his manner is invariably open, friendly, helpful and positive. It was like extracting molars to get him to suggest anything critical about anyone.
On the contrary, Kaufman exhibits admirable loyalty to his fellow writers and intimates, from the late Allen Ginsberg to the young Israeli superstar author Etgar Keret.
Kaufman likewise exhibits steadfast allegiance to certain ideas, none less than his lifelong devotion to Zionism and the Jewish people. Much of this derives from his being the son of a Holocaust survivor, which impelled him to seek out such teachers as Elie Wiesel, to move to Israel and serve in the IDF, to explore various forms of Judaism and to defend the Zionist idea time and again. He visits Israel frequently and even returned to his old army unit in 2003, when Israel was besieged by terrorist suicide bombings.
When San Francisco’s Himmelberger Gallery declined to publish a catalogue for an exhibition of Kaufman’s paintings because of the Zionist thrust in some of the catalogue’s essays, a local scandal ensued.
Kaufman resolved the matter in 2008 by founding his own publishing house, Miriam Books, which duly issued the catalogue.
Self-control
As a recovering alcoholic of 22 years, Alan Kaufman is a study in self-control and equanimity.
But if anything can set him off, it is expressions of anti-Semitism and anti- Zionism, which he says he hears repeatedly in the politically charged atmosphere of San Francisco. “You get it from the left and from the right,” he observes, “from the Tea Party types and from the so-called progressive forces and from the Occupy Wall Street people.
And it’s getting worse. I believe there’s as much anti-Jewishness around today as there was in the 1930s.”
Kaufman sighs. “A lot of things change, a lot don’t. The New York I once loved no longer exists. San Francisco, which once had such a vibrant literary and arts community – and you could live on nothing! – has now become far too expensive for struggling artists. And Israel, of course, has changed, too. But a lot there will never change – like the valor that’s needed to meet one’s military obligations. Even my most bohemian, left-wing friends in Israel still do their reserve duty. And it’s still a Jewish state. It bothers me that so many American Jews simply don’t understand Israel, have lost their sense of history.”
As a man who climbed out of the depths of alcoholism and despair to achieve artistic success and a sense of peace with himself, Kaufman knows something about change.
“I’ve been on a journey,” he says thoughtfully.
“I had to experience what I did. And I’m proud of what I’ve done.”
Or, as he sums it up near the end of “Drunken Angel”: “And so I look back on my life and it is divided into parts: my drunk years and my sober ones, and I can hardly believe the beauty, meaning, and victory that have attended my sober years. I have become someone I don’t recognize, and yet do... And, if asked by any who I most truly am, I can reply, “My name is Alan. I am an alcoholic. And it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”