Bel Kaufman, author of the 1965 best-selling novel Up the Down Staircase and granddaughter of the celebrated Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, died on Friday, July 25 in Manhattan. She was 103.

A former teacher, Kaufman turned her experiences teaching in New York City public schools into what was to become one of the most popular books of the 1960s, later turned into a film starring the actress Sandy Dennis. Using actual memos and other documents, Kaufman wrote with humor, pathos and great insight of the administrative nonsense prevalent in the urban high schools in which she taught for 15 years. The book’s title came from a note given to a student by a vice principal, which read: “Please admit bearer to class – detained by me for going up the down staircase and subsequent insolence.”

Born in Berlin, Kaufman grew up in Odessa and Kiev. Her father was a doctor and her mother, Lala Rabinowitz Kaufman, was a writer and the daughter of Solomon Rabinowitz, whose tales of Jewish life appeared under the pen name of Sholom Aleichem.

Kaufman’s family emigrated to the United States in 1923, settling in the Bronx. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from New York’s Hunter College and earned a Masters from Columbia University.

At the age of 100, Kaufman returned to Hunter College to teach a course on Jewish humor at her undergraduate alma mater Hunter College in New York.

Kaufman’s first marriage to Sydney Goldstine ended in divorce. She is survived by her second husband, Sidney J. Gluck, two children, a brother and a granddaughter.