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Tag : all of a kind family
July 27, 2020 by admin
A Children’s Classic with a Very Relevant Chapter
I don’t know why I never read books by Sydney Taylor when I was growing up (it wasn’t my gender; my sisters never did, either). But when my wife pulled her old copies out of a box recently, and my six-year-old daughter enjoyed listening to the first one, I was thrilled.
As a scholar of modern Jewish literature, and having designed and directed a residential program for authors of Jewish children’s literature, I had been a little embarrassed to admit that I know the All-of-a-Kind Family by reputation only. Getting to know Ella, Charlotte, Hennie, Sarah, and Gertie (and their little brother, Charlie) by reading Taylor’s books aloud to my daughter has been an unmitigated pleasure.
But imagine my surprise when, a few weeks into total Covid-19 isolation, as I read to my narrative-obsessed daughter for more hours each day than I had ever imagined possible, we unexpectedly came to the chapter in the second book in Taylor’s series, More All-of-a-Kind Family, “Epidemic in the City.”
I had been seeing historians posting primary sources on Twitter and looking to the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic as a newly relevant moment. But that’s not the epidemic the sisters encounter in Taylor’s book. Instead, it’s an epidemic of “infantile paralysis,” which only after a quick Google did I learn was the first major outbreak of polio in the U.S., which in 1916 ravaged the Lower East Side and Brooklyn neighborhoods where so many Jewish kids, like those in Taylor’s books, were concentrated. “The newspapers printed it in bold black headlines: Epidemic!”
Taylor is, as usual, spare and efficient in describing the plague’s effects: “Soon there were empty seats in the classrooms, and the clang of the ambulance bell was heard more and more frequently.” Apparently Japanese camphor was thought to ward off the disease (“Don’t like the funny smell,” Charlie says).
The family soon decamps to Rockaway Beach—their first-ever seaside vacation, made necessary (despite how little money they have) to avoid the disease in the crowded city. The children don’t get sick, but Lena, the woman marrying their Uncle Hyman, does, and eventually they have to convince her that even though she has lost her leg to the disease, Hyman still loves her and wants to marry her.
The same day I read those chapters to my daughter, I was spending my spare moments searching AirBnb and asking for recommendations on Facebook, trying to find a Rockaway Beach of our own (though in our moment, when public beaches seem unlikely to be useable, what I was hoping to find was a lake house with a little stretch of sand or dock). And every day we were hearing from friends and relatives who, like Lena, had caught the disease and ended up in the hospital.
In an excellent article about Taylor and her books, the literary scholar June Cummins—who tragically passed away last year, before publishing the biography of Taylor she had been working on—noted that Taylor “always claimed that she wrote the All-of-a-Kind Family stories for her daughter Jo, who asked, ‘Mommy, why is it every time I read a book about children, it is always a Christian child? Why isn’t there a book about a Jewish child?’”
What’s fascinating is that for my daughter, who has always had plenty of books about Jewish kids to choose from, the mirror that Taylor has given her, in the midst of a strange and upsetting situation, wasn’t of a Jewish child, per se, but of children living, bravely, through an epidemic.
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Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English at Wellesley College and until recently the Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center.
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June 25, 2020 by admin
Please Write One More…
All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown; More All-of-a-Kind Family; All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown ;Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family
When I was seven I wrote to Sydney Taylor, asking her to write another novel. Turn-of-the-century heroines Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertie showed me that as a Jewish female I had not only a history but a literary tradition as well. These were the first books I read where Jewishness was the norm—not a source of angst, but a happy fact of life.
I soon received a reply, explaining that Taylor had died in 1978, thus ending my hopes of a new novel. It was signed, “Affectionately, Ralph Taylor (husband).” It was my first literary correspondence.
Elizabeth Michaelson is it former LILITH intern and a 1996 graduate of Barnard College.
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June 25, 2020 by admin
Sarah Was My Soulmate
All-of-a-Kind Family, by Sydney Taylor, wasn’t so much read as lived. It’s a nostalgic book, but little kids are susceptible to nostalgia. Like the all-of-a-kind sisters themselves, I wasn’t able to buy books but instead borrowed them from the library. Somehow we happened to own this book. I read it an uncountable number of times, so that the various incidents— especially the crisis of Sarah’s losing the library book—seem almost, still to this day, like chapters from my own life. I felt close to each of these five sisters, though Sarah, shy and a little lost in the world, was my soulmate. The story of the library lady and Charlie formed my first notion of tragic romance, until they were replaced, several years later, by a certain Jane and her Mr. Rochester.
Rebecca Goldstein is the author of several books, including The Mind/Body Problem and, most recently, Mazel (Viking). She is a 1996 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
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June 25, 2020 by admin
On Yom Kippur When My Stomach Growls
Each year when I fast on Yom Kippur, I think of Charlotte, the second-to youngest sister of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family series. Charlotte only lasted until lunch before Mama insisted she wait until she was a big girl to fast all day, but her morning of fasting was serious business both for Charlotte and for me. The All-of-a-Kind Family girls were proudly, triumphantly Jewish, and they made it seem fun! When my stomach growls in the middle of my yearly fast, I conjure up Charlotte, and now that I am a big girl, I make it through to the end.
Lisa Pilar Cowan, 27 years old, is the daughter of authors Rabbi Rachel Cowan and the late Paid Cowan. She lives in Somerville, MA and works in an adolescent health clinic. Reading remains a way to figure out “who I am and what I want to do.”
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April 14, 2020 by admin
All-of-a-Kind Seder in the Time of Covid-19
In the unfolding of COVID-19, while some friends were frantically dashing back to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven or Ling Ma’s Severence, I reached for All-of-a-kind Family, by Sydney Taylor. It’s an old children’s book, doubly old—published in 1951 and set in 1912—about the five all-of-a-kind sisters, dressed alike and running around in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, surrounded by their fellow Jews. It was the confluence of two events that brought it to mind—quarantine and Passover.
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January 10, 2019 by admin
Revisiting My Past With All-of-a-Kind Family Hannukah
Several decades have passed since I encountered an All-of-a-Kind Family book for the first time. The newest installment looks different (as do I), but our reunion was sweet.
All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah (Schwartz & Wade, $17.99) follows the youngest sister of five, Gertie as she tries to help her sisters make latkes. The book is unlike Sydney Taylor’s original series in striking ways: author Emily Jenkins uses the present tense to convey a young child’s sense of immediacy, and Paul O. Zelinsky’s bold and tender color illustrations look nothing like Helen John’s original detailed ink drawings. Still, the characters were immediately recognizable, and the book retains the series’ essential New York-yness. Reading it, I was filled with the cozy longing the series has always triggered in me.
As an eight-year-old All-of-a-Kind Family fan, I didn’t understand my nostalgia for something I’d never known. I wanted to live in Taylor’s world, with its sisterly camaraderie and muslin petticoats. I thought my desire to buy candied tangerines from a peddler on the Lower East Side made me uniquely soulful. But my reactions actually reflected the feelings of many contemporary American Jews. As the late children’s literature expert (and Taylor biographer) June Cummins noted in a 2003 article: “In her book Lower East Side Memories, historian Hasia Diner develops the argument that this small geographical area became a source of cultural identity and pride for American Jews after World War II. … Diner credits Taylor as the first writer to view the Lower East Side nostalgically, effectively recreating it for postwar American Jews and non-Jews.”
Aha!
But I was also a kid, and kids have different relationships to their favorite books than adults do. Nothing I read today could ever capture my imagination the way the books I loved as a child did. That’s the consuming magic of childhood, the endless fascination we have with our favorite things. So, no literary feast can match the All-of-a-Kind Family episode in which Charlotte and Gertie amass a hoard of chocolate babies and broken cookies, then devour them in their bed after lights-out.
As an adult, it’s hard to find the room, or time, to enjoy this kind of extended imaginative experience. That’s probably just as well, since the idea of buying huge quantities of sweets for only two cents (the enduring fantasy of my childhood, and one that is slyly referenced in All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah) doesn’t have quite the same appeal today. Alas.
But maybe my most enduring All-of-a-Kind Family memories are yet to come. The scholar Alexandra Dunietz, who recently completed Cummins’ biography of Taylor, told me, “When my oldest was seven or eight, I started to read the books to my children. I remember this tremendous happiness we all felt—‘Oh, this is about a Jewish family, and they’re doing normal things! They’re losing library books! They go to the library on Friday!’” (We went to the library on Fridays, too.)
“I think I read all five books one after the other, a chapter or two a night,” Dunietz adds. “I have two boys and two girls, and they were all engaged.”
My three-year-old is too young for All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah, but he does love books about New York City. So I’ll show him the pictures of Gertie and her sisters in the hopes that he, too, will one day be captivated by the adventures of his fellow New Yorkers, the All-of-a-Kind Family.
Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan is a former Lilith intern and native New Yorker. Her work has appeared in City Limits, Paste, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
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December 3, 2018 by Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan
Revisiting My Past with All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah
Several decades have passed since I encountered an All-of-a-Kind Family book for the first time. The newest installment looks different (as do I), but our reunion was sweet.
All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah (Schwartz & Wade, $17.99) follows the youngest sister of five, Gertie as she tries to help her sisters make latkes. The book is unlike Sydney Taylor’s original series in striking ways: author Emily Jenkins uses the present tense to convey a young child’s sense of immediacy, and Paul O. Zelinsky’s bold and tender color illustrations look nothing like Helen John’s original detailed ink drawings. Still, the characters were immediately recognizable, and the book retains the series’ essential New York-yness. Reading it, I was filled with the cozy longing the series has always triggered in me.
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