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[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

[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."

[ladymondegreen]

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

So, my sister and I were playing 'hide the button' a game we regularly played on the Sabbath when we got sick of our board games and wanted something more active. I came running back into the living room to announce that I had hidden the button and promptly tripped over the ball my sister was playing with (I was about 9 at the time) and went flying headfirst into the unlit fireplace. This wouldn't have been too bad, but a) it was marble and b) it had a taut metal curtain made of tiny links that embedded themselves in my forehead. So for about three weeks I had a faint grid of cuts on my forehead. Thankfully, I had bangs, so it wasn't too visible, but I probably contributed to my 4th grade teacher's nervous breakdown by asking her if she wanted to play chess, and when she said we didn't have a board, showing her my forehead.

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.

We did a lot of Purim costumes in my family. When I was seven I wanted to be a mermaid, and my mother made me up in a fishnet jacket and a long skirt with dead-pale Rusulka makeup. A few years later year my sister and I went as Moses and the sheep, both of us wearing a lot of cotton batten. We were practically unrecognizable and thus won the costume contest for the first time ever. We also did an incredibly corny group costume when we were somewhat older based on the books of the bible. My sister wore a bunch of numbers taped onto a black background, my mother had a button that said 'Kiss me, I'm a Levite', I was an old cat (think T.S. Elliot), and I cannot remember what we did for Genesis and Exodus at all.

There was also the purim where my father rented a gorilla suit and hand-lettered a bedsheet so my mother could be a megillah. He later did a smaller sheet for my sister when we did a Purim shpeil for a party which was a commentary on the purim story written in doggerel (entirely by my father, who loved doing these sorts of things). He took everyone's existing costumes and combined them and wrote a show around them. This was particularly difficult because that was the year I chose to costume as Emma Lazarus (yes, I did) so he made me the narrator, which meant I got to memorize all the doggerel. My father revived his favorite Purim costume, the Shushan boy (say it out loud) complete with cape and tricorn, and carrying a tiny orange cloth pony. My mother was a megilla again, my smaller sister was Queen Esther in a tiny blue ball gown we had inherited and my littlest sister was a tiny megilla-in-arms. Purim schtick apparently runs in my family.

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."

I remember being so amazed by this coincidence in the book, and how real it seemed. Years later I met someone who had gone to a camp where Ella was one of the voice teachers, so it's possible this really happened, which gladdens my heart, even if they are probably both gone by now.