At 96, writer Bill Kaufman has a lifetime of stories

Bill Kaufman has always had stories in his head. Lots of them.

Many are childhood tales of growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, filled with family and friends, rabbis, teachers, neighbors - even a smattering of bootleggers, cops and prostitutes.

Some stories recreate the Ukrainian village life in his father's homeland more than 100 years ago; others recount his World War II army days in Europe; still others recount his far-flung international travels during his retirement years, from England to Israel (seven times) and Tibet.

Now more than 60 of these stories have been compiled in two collections published by Syracuse University Press. The most recent volume, "The Day My Mother Cried and Other Stories," was released this fall. The previous collection, "The Day My Mother Changed Her Name," came out in 2008. They are the first books produced by the former Jericho resident, who writes under his formal name, William D. Kaufman. He now lives at the Gurwin Jewish Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Commack, and today, he turns 96.

Kaufman, who earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1938, spent most of his career as a fundraiser for the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. He briefly owned a weekly newspaper, The Abingtonian, based near Scranton, Penn., but his newspaper career ended when he was drafted into the army. "I was always a little frustrated," he recalled when I visited with him recently. "I went nowhere on the journalism front. Finally, I made it."

Indeed, Kaufman has made it. His new book is a remarkable assemblage of warm and original stories, rich in historical texture and humorous observations. He draws on the experiences of immigrant life, growing up in the anthracite coal city of Scranton during the early 20th century, when the Jewish community "was centered around a single block." But Kaufman's writing resonates with a universal appeal - you feel as though you know these families, like the Lutheran townfolk of Lake Wobegon, the mythical Minnesota town created by humorist Garrison Keillor.

"He has a voice," says his daughter, Carole Kaufman, who contributed the glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish words for the second book. "It's connected to a certain age, evocative of small-town America," says his daughter, who teaches Judaic studies at a school in Newton, Mass. (He also has a son, Moss, a financial adviser in Hauppauge.) She points to stories like "The Flower of the South," a schoolboy's tale about his encounters with a Civil War veteran who had shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln.

Kaufman began writing stories about 25 years ago, shortly after his wife, Zelda, died. After taking a writing course at Stony Brook University, he started penning a story a week. He wrote longhand on a legal-size pad and sent out the stories to be typed by his former secretary. At the time, he was living at the assisted living Gurwin Jewish-Fay J. Lindner Residences (a serious health issue forced him to move recently to the nursing center), where he commandeered a table in the card room as his office. "He was their writer-in-residence," his daughter says.

The stories are true (well, mostly), says Kaufman, although some incidents happened to others, rather than to him. A few stories are fictional - but almost all are funny, imbued with unexpected zingers, sparing no one, including himself. "I look at the world as a comical stage," he says. In "Humoresque," for instance, he recounts his tortured attempts to master the violin. Ultimately, his father succumbs to the dreadful screeching: "'Enough is enough is more than enough,' Pop told my mother in his most sagacious manner, as if he was quoting from the Bible."

While he was at the assisted-living facility, Kaufman (an admitted ham) would periodically read his stories to a group of residents. "His readings were a symphony of hominess," says Sol Harrison, a resident who grew up in Philadelphia. "I enjoyed the stories of kids who didn't have any money - that's the way I grew up."

Frieda Norotsky, also a Gurwin resident, has long delighted in Kaufman's stories. "You can visualize every word in the nonagenarian era," she says. Norotsky and Kaufman have been close friends since they met about eight years ago. He taught her how to read Hebrew; they would make apple pies together and dance on New Year's Eve. Her favorite of Kaufman's collection of stories: "The Day My Mother Cried," a reminiscence about Kaufman's mother, who tearfully admonishes her indifferent son and daughter about throwing away bread in the street as "an insult to God."

She finishes the somber lecture by kissing her children, then giving "each one of us a stick of Juicy Fruit gum, which she had never done before."