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Jul. 27th, 2013 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOkay, 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.
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.
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Date: 2013-07-27 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-27 04:11 pm (UTC)