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

[sholio]

We had most of these books when I was a kid and I loved them. They're so sweet and cute! Also, as a sheltered rural gentile kid, these books were the source of like 90% of what I knew about Jewish practices and holidays 'til going off to college. (Which in retrospect makes me think about how staggeringly rare Jewish protagonists are in books for either adult or child readers, because I read everything I could get my hands on throughout my childhood and teen years, but I don't remember anything else in kiddie or adult genre fiction of my youth that talked in detail about Passover and the like.)

[nenya_kanadka]

That sounds super lovely!

I was going to say "I can't imagine having that many kids so close together" but actually when I was twelve my mom had four kids, the youngest of whom was three, so not that different after all.

[musesfool]

I loved those books as a kid!

[sartorias]

I remember reading and loving it, and it completely went over my head that it was about Jewish girls!

[landofnowhere]

As a kid I think my family only had More All-Of-A-Kind Family and then later I went back and read the first book. I don't think I knew there were more than two until fairly recently! The main thing I remember from the first book is the dusting!

[gwynnega]

I loved this book as a kid, too.

[skygiants]

I reread these books a few years ago and was kind of blown away by how much of a permanent impression each of the stories had made in my memory -- the paper doll book! the bedtime crackers! the pickle vendors! I had intensely clear mental images of all of these things way out of proportion to how much page space they actually take up.

[arduinna]

The All-of-a-Kind books were among the few to survive my ruthless purging a few years back. I haven't re-read them in ages, but I loved them to bits when I was a kid. <3 So good to hear they've held up!

[marycatelli]

I read 'em all as a child. All the way up to Ella of All of A Kind Family, which takes us up to WWI.

[naomikritzer]

These books are so awesome.

If this link works: https://photos.app.goo.gl/BPXB4CmpUFsXAC9t7

That's a photo of my Grandaddy, his parents, and his three older sisters (Syd, Eva, and Bess.) They lived in NYC in the early 20th century. His parents owned a laundry. I 100% read the All-of-a-Kind Family books as RPF about my literal family, even though Grandaddy went on to have two younger brothers, Hi and Aaron.

("Sarah" is the expy of the author, whose real name, like that of my great-aunt, was Sydney.)

[conuly]

I accidentally stole this book from the Brooklyn Public Library as a child. See, they were so used to seeing me walk out of there with one of my books and not checking one of theirs out (we were constantly overdue, so we never did take new books out, just went there to read) that they didn't stop me. And I was used to doing it too, so I didn't stop me. Halfway home I realized what I had done, but my father refused to walk back and return it until the next schoolday.

[hannah]

I grew up with these too! Such memories.

[chomiji]

I remember this from our synagogue library as a child during the 1960s: as you say, one of the few books about Jewish kids that was not about the Holocaust. I think we had most of them.

Sadly, 20 years ago when my daughter was in Sunday school, the synagogue library STILL had very few books that were not about the Holocaust. This is probably the reason why all three copies of E.L. Konigsburg's About the B'nai Bagels were almost always out during my years as a library volunteer: it was such a novelty for the kids to read something about a suburban Jewish kid who played baseball, had tooth braces, and worried about why his best buddy wasn't so friendly anymore, instead of about the Nazis.

[kore]

Aww, that sounds lovely. Pretty sure I read this as a kid, because the title and setting are very familiar.

[minnaway]

Those was wonderful!

I have vague memories of the two oldest girls dying a dress ecru with tea because it got a splotch on it or something? I don't remember the details, just that's how I learned the color ecru.

[osprey_archer]

I loved these books when I was a kid. I loved them so much that I sought out all the other books in the library with Jewish protagonists, but somehow even the ones that I found that weren't about the Holocaust (there was one about the intersection of the Jewish experience with the Civil Rights movement, IIRC? And one about a little girl who super wants a Christmas tree and her parents make a Hanukkah tree and her grandfather is ENRAGED) were not quite the same.

I always loved the whole library storyline, and also the part where Gertie and Charlotte use their pennies to buy sweets to eat secretly in bed (that sounded SO COOL to small me), and also the chapter where they all accompany Mama to the market... oh, and also there's the scene where they visit Papa in his shop and he's got a whole shipment of books in and they get to pick some TO KEEP... okay, so basically every scene in the first book is my favorite scene. (I read all the later ones two and loved them, but not quite as much.)

[zdenka]

I loved those books as a kid! I can't remember much about them now except a general impression of coziness. I'm very glad that the Suck Fairy hasn't hit them.

[legionseagle]

Are they the ones where one of the girls pretends she can tell the time, and keeps being sent out to do it? We had one or perhaps two in my primary school's library.

[torachan]

I just reread the whole series last year or the year before and they were great.

[ellen_fremedon]

Clearly I need to read these. My school library didn't have them, and I'd never even heard of them until a couple years ago, but they sound delightful.

[rosefox]

I'm so glad I posted about them and you enjoyed it!

[stranger]

Aha, so that's the title of that book I still recall reading, and couldn't find again!
Glad to have the information! I loved it at the time, realized later that it was showing a Jewish family in a Jewish neighborhood, and wondered why there weren't more like it.

[starlady]

One of my favorite books as a child. I read it many, many times--the descriptions of the crackers and candy in the shop still stick with me all these years later. If memory serves I may have acquired an ex-library copy at some point; I should look into that.

[asakiyume]

I loved this too--really great.

[carbonel]

The only books I can remember being in the same category (more or less) were the contemporary-when-written ones (1960s) by Marilyn Sachs: Amy Moves In, Laura's Luck, Amy and Laura, and Veronica Ganz. They were about Jewish kids, but they felt much too mundane to be particularly special to me.

On the other hand, I remembered them among the masses of books I read as a kid, so that's something.

(Which reminds me of a book I read -- no Jewish content -- about a girl whose family had to move from the country to a tenement in New York for financial reasons. It's all about dealing with the culture shock and finding new roots, and I really liked that one, but I can't remember the title.)