skygiants | (no subject)

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.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/343225.html

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Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

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.

From:

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.

Edited Date: 2013-07-27 03:49 pm (UTC)

From:

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.

From:

tree_and_leaf

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

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

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!

From:

ceitfianna

Oh interesting, I'll need to see if I can find more of them.

From:

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).

From:

coffeeandink

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

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

rymenhild

Next time I see you, I will lend Ten and a Kid to you. It is about Reizel, plucky eight-year-old girl who just knows that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is good and will help her mother and father and sisters and tiny brothers in all ways. Obviously the small, ill-behaved goat who showed up at Reizel's family's tiny house on Seder night is a gift from the Holy One and will bring miracles!

Highlights include:
-Reizel spying on the men's midrash class because she just wants to LEARN.
-Reizel and her father having snarky debates about minor points of Jewish practice, like whether the women are allowed to sit in the sukkah and eat dinner on time instead of bringing all the food out to Father and the baby brothers and only getting to eat when the men are done. (Spoiler: Reizel wins. Reizel wins EVERYTHING.)
-Everyone making fun of the eldest sister (aged 16) when a young visiting scholar starts courting her.
-A goat somehow knowing that what the family needs is MIRACULOUS FEATHERBEDS. RIGHT NOW.

See, now you have to read this book.

From:

skygiants

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

From:

skygiants

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

From:

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!)

From:

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.

From:

skygiants

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

From:

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.

From:

skygiants

. . . you are very good at doing that to me.

From:

hebethen

Rebecca's trial, I think. I remember she had a veil on, and someone (Rebecca?) threw a glove!

From:

rymenhild

It is such a perfect book for smart dreamy Jewish children, and it should have circulated so much more than it did. I don't know how my mother found it, but I definitely imprinted on it.

From:

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.