This was such a great book. Kaufman made a huge impact with it: Bel Kaufman, a former New York City schoolteacher whose classic first novel, “Up the Down Staircase” — shot through with despair and hopefulness, violence and levity, all manner of bureaucratic inanity and a blizzard of official memorandums so mind-bendingly illogical as to seem almost Kafkaesque — was hailed as a stunningly accurate portrait of life in a gritty urban school when it was published in 1965, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan.