Love of Language

by Lorraine Berry

Dave Kaufman '60 was one of the first IC grads to join the Peace Corps after President Kennedy established the organization. The life-changing moment for him came one day in Ithaca when he helped a woman buy a beer.

"I was an undeclared major," Kaufman explains, "getting good grades in analytic geometry and calculus with [former math professor] Dr. Worth, but also getting good grades in Spanish with Eduardo de Aguero, a young professor. So one day, I'm in a grocery store buying a Coke, and I hear the store owner shouting at a young woman, 'How old are you?' I walked over and, mustering my best Spanish, I asked the woman, 'Cuántos años tiene usted?' She smiled and said, 'Veintidós.' I told the store owner that she was 22. The woman gave me a big smile and started rattling away to me in Spanish. I was able to gather that she had just arrived in Ithaca from Guatemala, that her husband was a grad student at Cornell, and that she was very happy to have met me. I walked right over to my adviser's office and told him that I wanted to major in Spanish." Then, after graduation a friend of Kaufman's joined the newly formed Peace Corps, and Kaufman was inspired to do the same.

Kaufman was assigned to the Dominican Republic in 1962, one year after the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo. His official job was to train English teachers, but Kaufman thinks that ultimately he served a different purpose. "In retrospect," he says, "I tend to think that our real mission was to try to get to know the people in the towns and in the countryside and to let them see a new type of American."

Kaufman also found a way to make other connections to the Dominicans. One of these was baseball. "They love their pelota (baseball), and that worked well for me as a pretty fair left-handed hurler," he says. He played on the Puerto Plata team, helped to build a youth center, and made many close friends.

After returning to the United States, Kaufman traveled around a bit. He was soon offered a job back in the Dominican Republic, working at the Bi-National Center in Santo Domingo. BNCs are established overseas to promote cultural understanding; they also offer English language courses. Kaufman served as a student affairs grantee, organizing cultural events for students. And there he met and married Anita Hohenberg, a Dominican who is a freelance interpreter. They have two sons, Ari and Andy.

In 1975 Kaufman cofounded a language school, Conversa, in San José, Costa Rica. It offers an intensive Spanish language-immersion program, and it's a family affair: younger son, Andy, is the center's computer guru.

The Peace Corps has also turned into a family affair. "Ari joined up right after college," Kaufman says. "He served in Sri Lanka. Anita and I were very proud of him and of his decision. At the same time I've got to admit that we were happy to see him come home. Sri Lanka was not the safest place on the globe."

Yet Kaufman recognizes that a term in the Peace Corps is worth the occasional hardship or danger. "For me and for lots of my good friends the Peace Corps has been a life-changing experience. We remember it vividly, and we wouldn't trade it for all the tea in Sri Lanka."