Daily children’s book recommendations and events from Anita Silvey.
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For those hunting for a book about Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, today I want to remind some people of—and introduce others to—one of the most memorable books about Jewish life and customs ever written, All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor. When Taylor published this gem in 1951, books featuring religious Jewish children were hard to come by. To create her rare offering Taylor drew on her own personal experience. Although she also pursued a career as an actress and dancer for the Martha Graham Company, today Taylor is best remembered for the vibrant Jewish community she brought to life in this series of children’s books.
Taylor set her saga in New York, in a Lower East Side tenement at the turn of the twentieth century. There a family of two loving parents and five girls experience great joy, even though they do so in the midst of poverty. For these children, finding a button while dusting or getting a piece of penny candy can be a cause for celebration. Much as Betty Smith does in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Taylor demonstrates that what people enjoy, not what they possess, makes them rich in spirit. But for these girls the greatest pleasures come at the Jewish holidays, and these are lovingly described, just as a child might experience them.
At the end of this book, a boy arrives, and then the saga of the family is continued in other volumes. These books remain one of the best representations of the Jewish faith found in children’s books. They also linger in the mind of the reader well into adult years. When I ask groups of people about their favorite books from childhood, inevitably the All-of-a-Kind Family series always gets mentioned. In Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, novelist Meg Wolitzer remembered a particular scene where “two of the sisters lay in bed at night eating the precious crackers and candy they had bought during the day. Because the family had very little money, they needed to make them last, and so one of the sisters instructed the other about what particular one they were allowed to eat, and how many nibbles from the edge they were allowed to take.” This book gave Wolitzer “a sense of the multiple textures of the world.”
All-of-a-Kind Family and its sequels provide a sense of history and convey why family and community are so important—these books remind us just how wonderful special holidays can be for children.
Here’s a passage from All-of-a-Kind Family:
September was almost over. The High Holy Days had come and gone. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, had been heralded with the blowing of the ram’s horn in the synagogue; ten days later Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, had been honored with fasting and prayer. Here was still another holiday on the calendar which would be celebrated before Jewish folk could once more settle down to a spell of ordinary living.
Also recommended:
- All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown by Sydney Taylor
- All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown by Sydney Taylor
Additional Information
A few other events for
- It’s the birth date of Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritan John Cotton (1585–1652). Read Mayflower 1620: A New Look at a Pilgrim Voyage by Peter Arenstam, John Kemp, and Catherine O’Neill Grace and Anne Hutchinson’s Way by Jeannine Atkins, illustrated by Michael Dooling.
- In 1915 the Ku Klux Klan receives charter to function as a corporate fraternal order from Fulton County, GA. Read Witness by Karen Hesse and Night Fires by George Edward Stanley.
- It’s National Cookie Day. Read Cookie’s Week by Cindy Ward, illustrated by Tomie dePaola.