All of a Kind Family, by Sydney Taylor

[rachelmanija]

This book was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, but I don't think I realized there were sequels.

It's about a Jewish family in New York in 1914 with five little girls two years apart. The oldest is twelve, and the youngest is four. It's a sweet, gentle book, filled with period atmosphere and kindness and relatable kid issues, from losing a library book to inexplicably refusing to eat soup you normally love. Upon re-reading, it had been visited by the opposite of the Suck Fairy - it was, if anything, even better than I remembered. The publication date is 1951 but it feels timeless. The illustrations are great too.

As a kid, I loved it for being that rare book about Jewish girls that was not about the Holocaust. Apart from being crushingly depressing, those books were not very relatable for an American Jewish girl in Los Angeles in the 70s-80s, especially since I didn't have Holocaust survivors in my family. But I completely related to being obsessed with books and dolls, getting lost in a crowd, being poor, and fighting and bonding with friends.

Recommended for literally anyone who wants something sweet, cozy, and domestic, without being saccharine. It's pure comfort reading, and I can't wait to get to the sequels. And if you know any little Jewish girls who haven't already read it, it would make a nice gift.

Thanks to Rosefox for reminding me to re-read this!

All-of-a-Kind Family (All-of-a-Kind Family Classics)

Comments

[rachelmanija]

Wait, what? The stuff that's sold as lox is not lox? (I do find it salty.)

[nenya_kanadka]

Maybe it depends where you are?

I've only had lox that tasted like very thin smoked salmon. But I live on Vancouver Island, so.

[rachelmanija]

I always thought lox was just a type of smoked salmon.

[nenya_kanadka]

I have the vague sense that lox is supposed to be different or special somehow, but I couldn't tell you how.

Though it does give me lots of points in Word Blitz.

[rachelmanija]

I just looked it up, and apparently the One True Lox is brined and NOT smoked. I now have no idea what I've been eating all my life. And also, I am now debating whether to cut references to "smoked salmon" as a clue on lox in a book I'm writing and replaced them with "brined salmon," or leave them as is on the basis that if I don't know the difference most readers will also get the right mental image.

[conuly]

Hm. When reading a book set in medieval Afroeurasia, do you mentally edit all references to "potatoes" to read "turnips" instead? If so - change it. If not, don't bother.

[rachelmanija]

Sorry, I don't understand the thing about medieval potatoes and turnips.

[jesuswasbatman]

Potatoes were introduced to Europe from America in the early modern period, while turnips are authentically medieval European root veg.

[rachelmanija]

But did turnips used to be called potatoes or vice versa?

[conuly]

No, but you can use them similarly. Hence, every time I see a misplaced potato I just pretend the author knew better and meant to put in a turnip instead.

Edit: It's almost always potatoes, btw. Sometimes it's tomatoes or peppers - all nightshades, incidentally. I don't have convenient head-translations for tomatoes or peppers. They just fester in the back of my mind instead.

[rachelmanija]

How do you feel about potatoes in Lord of the Rings?

[mildred_of_midgard]

*waves hand like that kid in class*

Potatoes in LOTR are legit! Or at least retconnable.

Tolkien specifically has the Numenoreans bring tobacco back to Middle-earth from the New World, so it's entirely possible they did the same for potatoes. The only counterevidence (that I'm aware of) is that there are what *appear* to be potatoes in the First Age, but since they're only named "earth-bread", those could be something else, or they could be potatoes that came from the New World by another means.

[conuly]

Pales in comparison to the tobacco in same - another nightshade, incidentally.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Prologue to Lord of the Rings, "Concerning Pipeweed":

"[Hobbits] imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed or leaf, a variety probably of Nicotiana...All the same, observations that I have made on my own many journeys south have convinced me that the weed itself is not native to our parts of the world, but came northward from the lower Anduin, whither it was, I suspect, originally brought over Sea by the Men of Westernesse."

See also my comment directly above yours and how I think this might apply to potatoes as well.

[conuly]

Obvious retcon, but even the esteemed Tolkein didn't know everything.

[mildred_of_midgard]

He didn't, but most of his retcons, this one almost certainly included, were meant to remedy, not gaps in his factual knowledge, but changes in the type of story he was telling. I don't know at what point in his life he learned that potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco came from the New World, but the reason they were introduced in his story and then had to be retconned was that the setting had evolved to need a retcon.

There were a lot of other retcons he said he wished he could introduce, but it was too late, and others he was still struggling with at the end of his life. E.g., the map of Middle-earth doesn't match the map of Europe 6,000 years ago, but by the time he decided it should, it was far, far too late.

I suppose you could say his biggest knowledge gap was that when he started a story, he didn't know where it was going to end up.

[kore]

Did DWJ mention potatoes in her famous stew section of Tough Guide to Fantasyland? I forget.

[conuly]

Potatoes are a New World crop. Lots of people think everybody knows this. Rather more people do not know this. Some of the latter group are authors, and every time I encounter potatoes in Medieval Europe, I have to edit that in my head (and sometimes with a pencil on the page) to read "turnips" instead.

If you don't do that, I wouldn't worry about the lox thing. If you do, I would.

[marycatelli]

I once read a story set in Archaic Greece where there were potatoes and a character named John.

Turns out that I had thus missed two clues that it was not Archaic Greece.

[sholio]

As another data point, I always thought lox and smoked salmon were the same thing, just presented a bit differently -- the stuff I've had that was called lox was on the east coast and was very thinly shaved like lunch meat, while west coast smoked salmon is not sliced like that, so I just figured it was one of those regional things. If not for this thread, I wouldn't have realized that you couldn't call smoked salmon lox and vice versa. So I doubt if the vast majority of readers will care. At most, it might be one of those "there are no snakes in Wyoming!" things (or whatever the heck that was, I can never remember the details). But basically, the kind of thing where one or two readers would be like "... what" but 99% of them won't think about it.

[rachelmanija]

Yeah, I will carry on using "smoked salmon" as a synonym. If I used "brined salmon," 1) no one but three people on this DW would know what I meant, 2) Tirzah is probably buying the same lox I am, in which case it is in fact smoked.

There are NO cottonmouths in Oklahoma!!!!! (yes there are).

[conuly]

I mean, it is lox in the sense that "what we call X is X, what we call Y is Y", but it's not what they meant by lox. It's smoked salmon.

And I like things super salty, like, lick the salt off the pretzels and chips and ritz crackers and then ditch the rest salty.