![]() One day, Mama hides a dozen buttons in the front room, which Sarah must find while dusting. Practically the only time the girls enter the holiest of holies is to clean it. Even though the five sisters in the titular family - Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte and Gertie - share one bedroom, somehow there’s a formal front parlor that is almost never used, as embalmed as Miss Havisham’s dress. Consider Chapter Two’s tour de force set piece: the dusting scene. “All-of-a-Kind” Family embeds itself in the mind by turning ordinary life into sacred ritual and de-mystifies religion by making it a ritual of the everyday. It’s déjà vu, or pre-jà vu, or all-of-a-jamais vu. The all-of-a-kind memories become readers’ memories. Taylor’s editor worried that readers wouldn’t connect with the details of Jewish life. The Jewish tenements on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century glow with nostalgia think Proust’s madeleine as a challah. ![]() In 1951, Follett published Sydney Taylor’s “All-of-a-Kind Family,” the first children’s book for a mass audience that featured American Jews. Image by Courtesy of Lizzie Skurnick Books ![]()
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