Wallace Kaufman

"You're just like your grandfather," my mother began to say when I was five and she never stopped saying it until she died at age 90. She did not say it with joy because her father had always been a mystery to her, often an unpleasant one.

I cannot dispute her because I know him only from her stories and from the family and public records that support her creation.

He emigrated from England as a young man to escape its rigid class system in which he had few prospects beyond a life of labor. He was quite willing to labor hard in America where he saw opportunity. He began as a track walker under the blazing Texas sun, then became a coachman and horsehandler on the estates of Long Island's Fitzgerald era "Gold Coast". His ambitions and interests and thrift led him to open a small candy and news store in Roslyn, NY, become a photographer, then a dealer in rare books and junk and a sometime real estate broker. He was also a community activist who demanded respect from both rich and poor. He once landed his rowboat on the shores of JP Morgan's estate and when ordered off by the guards, he told them the shoreline was public and they'd have to get the big man himself to throw him off.

My mother watched with amusement and fear as I followed a very similar path. I began work at 10 shoveling snow and mowing lawns, moving up to scraping and painting swimming floats and working in an asbestos-graphite gasket factory after school and on weekends.

My generation had opportunities much wider than my grandfather's and my interests were wider. Like him I also learned the rare book business and bought and sold books throughout college and into the early years of my professional life.

Duke University I chose for three reasons, the first and foremost being that I knew well the kinds of kids who went to Harvard, Princeton and Yale and I knew their families. I wasn't like them. I was convinced I would fail in these schools. I chose Duke because it was good enough, was halfway to Alabama where I thought I had a girlfriend, and because it had both a soccer team and an English department with a choice of professors and courses.

I was fortunate to find myself at Duke when novelist Reynolds Price was beginning his teaching career alongside the venerated professor of writing and Elizabethan literature, William Blackburn. My fellow students in their courses from whom I learned much included Fred Chappell and Anne Tyler.

Duke at that time did not charge its present luxury tuition, and its student body was much more diverse than its presently touted diversity. Durham was still very much a blue collar tobacco worker's town, not an upscale member of the Research Triangle Area. The warehouses and mills and affordable cafes buzzed with real southerners and offered three veggies and a meat with iced tea for less than a dollar.

In graduate school at Oxford I learned the real nature of a class system. Without any design on my part I found my closest friends among the few real blue collar students there and among patrons of blue collar pubs. I also had good friends across the board, of course, including faculty dons like Neville Coghill.

I played soccer for my college, Merton, and joined the Crime Society and served as president of the Oxford Poetry Society. On vacations I worked as a stage hand in the theatre and as a tractor driver in the hops fields of Herefordshire. Although I had no interest in family history at the time, I came to understand the society and the class system that had inspired my grandfather and grandmother to emigrate to America.

I couldn't wait to get back to a place I had come to appreciate for its blunt talk and relative meritocracy. I finished my thesis and degree in two years, forewent the third year offered to Marshall Scholars, and returned to America.

After brief stints as a short order cook, construction laborer, high school science teacher, middle school English teacher, and assistant curator at a new natural history museum, I took a job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill teaching writing and literature.

From this point most of my story is told in my memoir, Coming Out of the Woods. Like my grandfather I could not resist becoming both a community activist and following my curiosity and entrepreneurial ambitions in several directions at one time.

Denied tenure with the public explanation that the department did not have room for a "generalist," I left full time teaching after 9 years and focused on the experimental land development business I had started--selling land with covenants to preserve its wildness.

I quickly found I had to learn more about construction, appraisal, finance, and marketing. I learned and I also wrote about them.

I went on branching out, building my own house room by room, stone by stone, board by board, mistake after mistake. I also began traveling in Latin America with my daughter Sylvan when she turned six. I wanted her (and me) to be bilingual. By chance I began translating for Mayan writer Victor Montejo and working to gain more recognition for indigenous writers in general. (I did two books for Victor--El Q'Anil and a book of Mayan animal fables. Victor went on to become a professor of anthropology in California, then Minister of Peace in Guatemala where he had been hunted by the death squads when we began his first book.)

In 1989, thanks to belated elaboration of a Boy Scout merit badge for radio work, I had learned Morse Code, qualified for an amateur operator's license and signed on to an expedition to the Soviet Arctic where Americans and Soviets would demonstrate Perestroika its new freedoms by broadcasting to the world from a formerly closed zone. I wrote about it, of course. I also returned to consult with new Russian businesses.

In the mid 90s, thanks to my varied work background in real estate and housing and to my rudimentary knowledge of Russian, International City/​County Management Association (ICMA) took a gamble on making me its resident adviser for housing and land reform in the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan.

I lived and worked and wrote there for two years, the longest time I've ever lived in a city, but the setting was blessed by a vast surrounding wilderness, including the great white wall of the Tien Shan mountains that flanked the city of Almaty and greeted me every morning as I set out for work.

On and off I continued my work in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, including Mongolia--teaching property valuation, evaluating aid projects, doing economic survey work for the World Bank, and training journalists.

In 2001 I had moved from North Carolina to western Oregon to avoid the suburbanization spreading out from the Research Triangle and turning a once rural county full of Southern characters into a bedroom community full of high tech characters.

In Oregon I continue to write. I have begun to build on my occasional work as an arbitrator and mediator by developing that practice as a new career.