She was ahead of her times in many ways, as June Cummins has shown in the first-ever biography of the award-winning author, “From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind ‘All-of-a-Kind Family’” (Yale University Press), written with Alexandra Dunietz. Taylor helped Jewish children see people like themselves and their traditions in the pages of books, and bring Jewish culture to an American audience. Anyone with siblings will appreciate the way these young women get along (and sometimes don’t - but end up making amends by the end of the chapter). To an adult reader, Taylor’s sentences remain vivid and her dialogue crisp and realistic. Last week I found four of the five volumes in the series in my local library and quickly went through them, remembering not only Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte and Gertie but the connections my younger self had felt to each of them. I hadn’t read the “All-of-a Kind Family” books since I was a kid and read them over and over. Set in 1912 and featuring the adventures of five sisters in a hardworking immigrant Jewish family on New York’s Lower East Side, the book inspired a series that went on to sell millions of copies and remains in print.
“All-of-a-Kind Family” was the first from a mainstream publisher to highlight Jewish children. The dialogue is revolutionary. Few novels of the time - let alone one aimed at a children’s audience - would make so natural a reference to a Jewish holiday or, in this case, its relevance to everyday life. ( New York Jewish Week via JTA) - In Sydney Taylor’s 1951 book “All-of-a-Kind Family,” a young girl says to her sister, “You’ll have to make up with her when Yom Kippur comes.”
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