(no subject)

[skygiants]

Okay, who here remembers The All-Of-A-Kind Family?

A couple weeks ago I reread all the All-Of-A-Kind-Family books I owned as a kid, which includes The All-Of-A-Kind Family, More All-Of-A-Kind Family, and All-Of-A-Kind Family Uptown. (All-Of-A-Kind Family Downtown and Ella of All-Of-A-Kind Family don't exist, because I didn't own them. That's how it works, right?)

The books are a series of semi-autobiographical stories about a Jewish family on the Lowest East Side with five daughters, each two years apart, and their DOMESTIC ADVENTURES, such as "WE LOST OUR LIBRARY BOOK now we have to pay the money back!" or "Hetty stayed out too late and Pa was mad!" or, of course, "everyone has measles but we still have to get ready for Shabbat!"

(Sidenote: my family is a High-Holidays-only kind of unobservant Reform Jewish; thanks to these books, I spent several childhood years feeling obscurely guilty that we did not go through the whole ceremony of getting dressed up and cleaning house for Shabbat. THE ANGEL WATCHING WAS GONNA BE SAD.)

What's really amazing to me, though, in rereading as an adult, is how sparse the actual prose in the books is compared to how incredibly strongly the images stuck with me. For example: there's a chapter in which the kids find a book of fashion-plate paper dolls. The description of the paper dolls is literally one sentence long. But that paper doll book was the most vividly desirable things in the world to me at a certain age. I PINED FOR IT. The part where the younger kids buy a bag of assorted cookie pieces and play a game of eating them secretly in bed: four sentences. BEST GAME IN THE WORLD. The four pages about family friend Lena getting polio and refusing to marry her fiancee because she's too depressed about her new limp, until the family talks her out of her fit of self-sacrifice: in my mind, this was a FULL BOOK'S worth of epic romance and heartwrenching angst that has stuck with me until this day.

It's actually a very strange feeling, looking back at these books and at my younger self, and knowing that a very simple sentence can have a stronger and more lasting impact on a six-year-old than my most carefully crafted paragraph of prose probably ever will.

Anyway. All-Of-A-Kind nostalgia, anybody? HERE IS THE PLACE.

Comments

[musesfool]

I loved those books as a kid, but I've never seen anyone else mention them, so I started wondering if maybe I'd imagined the whole thing.

[skygiants]

THEY WERE REAL. And three of them are sitting on my shelf next to me! I saw someone mention them in a con write-up recently, actually, which jogged my memory for the re-read.

[ceitfianna]

I loved these books and remember so clearly the Purim dress up and when a library book was lost and paying for it. They were books that I've reread a lot of times. Though as I look at your list, I only had the first two when they were younger and none of the other ones.

Also because I grew up in an area with a strong Jewish population, they felt helpful, like oh here's more of an explanation of some things that happened. I wonder if I still have my copies because now I want to reread them.

[skygiants]

All-Of-A-Kind Family Uptown is interesting because that's when World War I starts going on in the background -- Ella has a boyfriend who's off on the front, so there's this sort of weird dark undercurrent, like the polio in More All-Of-A-Kind Family.

[rymenhild]

I only remember being obsessed with the concept of quarantine. And confusing the sisters with the sisters of Ten and a Kid, who lived in a shtetl in Eastern Europe instead of a tenement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

[skygiants]

I never encountered Ten and a Kid, but now I wish I had!

Weirdly, the quarantine itself didn't stick with me -- I say weirdly because later I went on to be fascinated with stories about plagues and quarantines and so on. But the outcome of the polio, and Lena's leg, was hugely resonant.

[sovay]

And confusing the sisters with the sisters of Ten and a Kid, who lived in a shtetl in Eastern Europe instead of a tenement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

HELLO ONLY OTHER PERSON ON THE PLANET WHO HAS READ THAT BOOK.

[tree_and_leaf]

I've never heard of these, which is a shame, because I think I'd have loved them.

[skygiants]

They were super formative for me. Even though they did not resemble my life experience AT ALL, they were just close enough that for a time I really wanted them to!

[hebethen]

Oh, I remember the library book story! I don't remember if I actually read it as a standalone book or if it was collected in this set of children's readers that my parents bought for me (they were bright red and spanned everything from Winnie-the-Pooh to, if you can believe it, Ivanhoe).

[skygiants]

. . . I have got to ask, what part of Ivanhoe?!

[coffeeandink]

All I remember is the tea-colored dress. I wanted one so badly!

[skygiants]

It sounded gorgeous! I will admit I was also mad that I had no sisters I could steal dresses from and accidentally destroy. >.>

[sovay]

What's really amazing to me, though, in rereading as an adult, is how sparse the actual prose in the books is compared to how incredibly strongly the images stuck with me.

The book that happened for me with, weirdly enough, was Tik-Tok of Oz.

[skygiants]

I suspect if I reread a couple of the Oz books I would get some of the same thing -- I have some very clear mental images from the series as a whole, although I have no idea which Oz book any of them are from. (The woman who had a collection of heads!)

[ellen_fremedon]

I had never heard of these until maybe a year ago, and I still have not read them, but I wish they'd been part of my literary landscape when I was a child; I think I would have loved them.

[skygiants]

As formative things go, they were pretty amazing. And it was your DW post that reminded me to reread them, so!

[kd7sov]

I've never read these, but I'm reminded of a story a friend of the family once told, about The Secret Garden - how she read it as a kid, and she vividly remembered beautiful illustrations, and then much later she found the same edition and it had no illustrations at all. She'd come up with all of it from the descriptions and her imagination.

[skygiants]

Oh, whoa! I mean, I did have an edition of Secret Garden with gorgeous illustrations, but I can totally see how that would happen -- it's such an evocative book.

[jothra]

My mom read these books, and then gave them to me to read. My memorable images from them were the dusting game, and the eating crackers and candy in bed.

Also the time the youngest daughter lied about being able to tell time, but figured it out by the end of the chapter. We're talking major life dilemma, here.

[skygiants]

The dusting game! What a great way to trick your children into doing work, man.

AND OH MAN THE TELLING-TIME CHAPTER. It's like a precursor of the "never lie on a job interview" thing. @__@

[sylleptic]

Those books! Oh, wow, everything you and other people mentioned here calls up such vivid memories. I think only the first two existed in my world. (And that's totally how it works.)

Though I haven't reread them in a long time because the thing that stuck with me most strongly was the bit where one of the girls refuses to eat something at a meal and her parents won't give her any other food until she does eat it, and she ends up feeling horribly defiant and guilty and miserable. Probably also just a couple sentences, in retrospect, but it certainly made a strong and unhappy impression on me.

But more happily, I can still picture the mustache cup they buy their father!

[skygiants]

Oh man, that chapter! I identified so hard with that, because of course when you're a stubborn kid you just DON'T WANT TO GIVE IN no matter how unhappy you are, and it's about GIVING IN.

The moustache cup is so cute though. And sort of an unexpected hit -- you expect it to be a cute gift-giving chapter all the way through, and then there's that moment of ". . . they spent money on this?"

[metaphortunate]

Aaah! Yes!

And it was SO FOREIGN to me. I mean, I grew up in South Texas. I knew exactly one Jewish kid growing up. And the past, of course. Man. So fascinating, those other worlds!

[genarti]

Same here! I had Jewish friends, but all of the High-Holidays-only Reform sort, and none close enough that we really talked about holidays and customs. And I grew up in a suburb with rural relatives, so honestly what was most foreign to me was the whole NYC-of-the-past thing. (Similarly, I remember reading a picture book as a child about a kid going trick-or-treating door to door in her apartment building, and being so baffled by how this worked.) Cookie barrels and pickle barrels and general stores I knew from prairie reenactment villages and the Little House books and all, but combining that era of the past with cities was just such a foreign notion to baby me. And I had two younger brothers (with whom I squabbled constantly) and pined for a sister. Basically the whole book* was a fascinating window on a completely different world.

*I say book, because I never read the sequels. I'm not sure if my library didn't have them, or if it just seemed like such a complete one-off book that I never thought to look for more.

[rachelmanija]

I adored those books. I especially remember the crackers in bed, and the delicious treats they each got for a penny: a pickle, roast chickpeas, chocolate babies. And hiding buttons to make dusting fun!

I too recall them being very detailed, but I guess it wasn't that there was tons of description, but that all the description was incredibly vivid.

[skygiants]

THE FOOD IS SO GOOD. Man, children's books have the greatest food descriptions. Why don't adult books ever provide this? I mean except specifically food-related nonfiction, I guess.

[scifantasy]

Now that you mention them, I remember them faintly.

[skygiants]

Hah, I guess they weren't quite as formative!

[ladymondegreen]

Oh, I have so many memories of these books.

I took hard to the Maypole dancing chapter and recreated the maypole scene with my toy samovar (yes, I had a toy smaovar, given to me by local Russian immigrants, it was wooden and painted and almost 8 inches high with a removable tea pot) as the pole, and some decoratively knotted string and my dolls. My sisters and I used to play maypole all the time.

I also got very badly injured once, playing a hide-the-button game derived from the dusting chapter.

These books were hugely formative for all three of us; the rice soup chapter, the tea-dyed dress, the whole sequence of buying penny candy and eating it in bed and making up games around it, watching Ella kasher poultry with her neighbor Grace being horrified by all the salt, the way Henny would run off her mouth, but was also a proto-feminist, the time Charlotte burned a hole in her dress because she wanted to hold a coal, the way the narrator (who I never realized was really Sarah, which is to say Sydney, all grown up) describes their mother's figure and the figures of other women, the time they get lost at Coney Island and the police find them, the whole lost romance between Charlie the peddler and their librarian!

Oh, and the scarlet fever sequence, and when Charlie is born, and all the Tantes (aunts) and the purim party, and, and, and this series was such a cornerstone of my childhood.

[skygiants]

...I want to hear your story about your hide-the-button injury! PLEASE DO SHARE.

The Purim costumes were incredibly formative for me. I was always also very sad that we didn't do Purim in my neighborhood the way they did it in the books.

Also, man, the long-lost romance between the only two single (goyim) adults in the first book. ADORABLE. I am pretty sure that Miss Allen was one of the trope-setters for "hot librarians."

[batyatoon]

Oh man I LOVED THOSE BOOKS SO HARD.

I really, really, really want to find them again.

[skygiants]

. . . I mean, you don't have very far to look! YOU COULD ASK A FRIENDLY NEW YORK NEIGHBOR who has three sitting right here on her shelf. :D?

[izilen]

Mandatory YEAH I FEEL YOU comment about the intensity of feeling and clarity of memory books produced when I was a kid. As I've said to you before, I kind of miss that way of reading where it was so much easier for my imagination to cling to something and expand upon it.

I TOO have been rediscovering childhood favourites, by which I mean my favourite books when I was 5 to 6 years old and didn't read anything longer than a hundred pages. IT'S SO WEIRD how much they made me feel.

[sapote]

Now I am reading the other booklogs, and oh wow, the cookies were only four sentences? To this day I remember that lemon cookie as the most delicious thing that could ever happen to anyone. Also, didn't Lena have a beaded curtain in her kitchen? SO SOPHISTICATED TO ME.