I enjoyed reading this aloud to my kids. When I asked them what they liked about this book, they said “the ending” and “the mommy.” This book is about a Jewish family in New York City (way back when candy could be bought for a penny, which blew my kids’ minds) and each chapter tells about an interesting event or holiday in their lives, alongside their everyday life. The last two chapters have fun surprises in them. The book talks about Jewish customs and holidays.

What a wonderful, endearing, lovely read this was! The adventures of five little girls (Gertie, Charlotte, Sarah, Henny and Ella) aged between four and twelve living with their mama who looks after the home, and papa who runs a junk shop in the East Side in New York City. I shouldn’t perhaps say adventures, for really this is the story of their daily lives, the daily happenings, chores, trips to the library, the little ups and down, the joys and sorrows that life brings every day―but that in itself is an adventure and I loved every bit of it.

The book opens with the girls heading off to the library on Friday, the day being ‘library day’ for them. That was enough to have me love it! But I loved it for so much more. For one, that the girls and their parents find happiness and contentment in what little they had; their means may have been modest but they lived life to the fullest within it and had their little pleasures with trips to the library, to the market, celebrating various festivals, even a day-out at Coney Island. This is something I feel one needs to remind oneself every so often, in a time when we are always wanting more no matter how much we have and are never satisfied―one doesn’t need to have much to be happy, just to appreciate all one has and enjoy it to the fullest rather than spending all one’s time brooding over all one hasn’t. (This aspect was very reminiscent of the Family at One End Street, and something I loved about that book too.) The other thing about this book I really loved was how rich it was in terms of showcasing culture. The beautiful detail in which Taylor describes Jewish festivals and observances makes one feel as if one is there with the family, watching the celebrations as they happen, listening to the sounds, and smelling the food (almost tasting it, even). And then of course the people themselves―none of the girls are really naughty as such, mostly well-behaved but they are all very real, very human and very likeable and I loved them all.

I was so thrilled to learn that this is a series of books and there are four more I haven’t read. Really looking forward to these.

It wouldn’t do to not mention the illustrations by Helen John which I also really liked very much.

A delightful read- if I could have rated it more than five stars, I would have :) I know I will keep coming back to this one often.

I loved sharing this childhood favorite with my children.

I loved the ALL-OF-A-KIND-FAMILY books when I was a child. Sydney Taylor’s series begins with five sisters, two years apart and their weekly library trip and ends with a surprise.

ALL-OF-A-KIND-FAMILY takes place on 1912. Written decades ago, as expected, I cringed a few times at the dated ideas like human circus “freaks” although mostly the values of family, responsibility and love hold up to modern scrutiny.

Stories of Jewish families were rare when Taylor first penned her books, but the family could have been any race or religion, even ambiguous for the universality of the story.

ALL-OF-A-KIND-FAMILY is a winner.

Thought we read all of this book a few years ago, but sadly we didn't finish for some reason! We just read it ALL as a read aloud and all 5 kids ranging age 3 to 11 years old loved it! It was a delightful read that we will read and reread for years to come! Especially loved the ending! Such a sweet book!

2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, to not only become a successful children's author but a highly influential and groundbreaking one, in the spirit of Judy Blume or John Green; so that has her reading classics from the genre these days that first missed her attention as an actual child, which in turn has me occasionally reading children's classics that first missed my own attention as an actual child. This is one of them, first published in 1951, eventual winner of the Charles W. Follett Award and the first-ever National Jewish Book Award for children's literature; it can be rightly called "Little House on the Prairie but for an urban Jewish family," in that it's based on the true childhood of the author (who was in late middle-age when she wrote it), who grew up in a Yiddish immigrant family who lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1910s, in the height of its days as a tenement-filled magnet for fresh Eastern European immigrants, especially Yiddish Jews from Tsarist Russia's "Pale of Settlement" (i.e. the countries that have always borne the brunt of the damage from Russia's collisions with the West -- Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, etc.).

To be clear, it's very well-done, a charming and captivating look back at these crowded, noisy, smelly streets from the nostalgic filter of an eight-year-old girl who saw it all with magic and wonder; but as I pointed out to my friend in our mini-book club of it afterwards, it's not a coincidence at all that this found a publisher just three years after the publication of Anne Frank's diary, and I remarked how if it this had come out twenty years previous or twenty years in the future, it wouldn't have gotten nearly the kind of traction from society that it did by coming out directly after the Holocaust, when the Western arts was looking for as many heartwarming stories about Judaism they could find. Also, be aware that this is written from a pre-Beverly Cleary point of influence, i.e. all the kids are angelic little docile sweethearts and the forever wise parents are always patient and understanding, one of the last big hurrahs of the "Don't Speak Unless Ye Have Been Spoken To" school of children's literature before Mid-Century Modernism and then Postmodernism put an end to it for good. Still, the pure joy the girls get out of things like the giant beards and bellies of all the shopkeepers along their street, or eating a plain baked sweet potato for a penny because it's literally the one thing they'll have all week with any kind of sugar in it whatsoever, is worth the time alone it takes to read this slim little volume, not to mention the entire chapter devoted to all the sisters getting scarlet fever (!), which is to say nothing of the ridiculously Dickensian coincidence to end the entire thing. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, a chance to see a forgotten classic written in a Mid-Century Modernist style but about subjects you've never seen Mid-Century Modernism take on before, an eye-opening experience still very much worth the time of your own current tween kids.

Very sweet. I appreciated that the first story involved a child having to take responsibility and suffer the consequences of her actions straight up. Others were kind to her and helped bear some of the burden, but she wasn't completely rescued or shielded...or crushed and berated, for that matter.

Reader was very good.

I read my copy of this book to pieces when I was a girl, but had completely forgotten about it until we received a copy through a book subscription for my children. It gave me such warm fuzzy feelings to read it to my own daughter, and she loved it too!

All-of-a-kind family is a set of short stories, oh, and it is so very dated. My daughter actually loved it much more than I did. Maybe I am way too used to having a point when telling stories, and this one was much of the day-to-day of a Jewish family. From taking books from the library, getting sick or cleaning the house, most stories are fine, but that is it. Each chapter is its own, telling about a different situation and finished without having much of a storyline.

It is overall cute, girls that are saving money (and the prices are funny), getting stuff for papa's birthday, or playing in Purim. The relationships between the five girls are interesting.

I do not think that anybody would publish such a book today, with a simple story about a soup tantrum, or cleaning the house. But I guess it is part of the magic, how old and dated it is. 3 stars.

Sweet little collection of stories about five sweet girls and their love for each other and their parents

I read this because it was a childhood favorite of mine, and it lives up to my nostalgia, being a charming portrait (with charming illustrations) of 1910s Jewish life on the Lower East Side. I loved it as a kid particularly because it was about kids like me (namely, Jews) and I still love it for that; the holidays here are my holidays, and in particular there's a moment early in the book where it says, casually, that it's the last week of December and a really exciting day is coming up: the 5th of January, Papa's birthday. And of course for most of American there is another far more exciting day that happens in the last week of December, but that day does not matter for these characters any more than it mattered for me. I certainly encountered a lot of "yeah, they have Christmas, but we have CHANUKAH!" moments in my childhood reading, but sometimes it's soothing to see the majority holiday not just trumped but completely ignored.

It was also interesting to read side by side with All the Single Ladies, because of course so much of it is focused on marriage and home life and expectations for women in its particular era (and also arguable in the era that Taylor was writing, namely the 1950s). There's a line toward the end of All-of-a-Kind Family that perfectly demonstrates what Traister describes as traditional attitudes toward single women in All the Single Ladies: "She was Mama's widowed sister and earned her own living by working in a factory, but she was ever ready to give up her job when she was needed."

I also found myself reflecting back on the bit in All the Single Ladies where the author talks about her grandmother's "obsessive" cleaning schedule of scrubbing the floors 3 times a week, and how this was a sign she was unfulfilled in her life as housewife; here, Mama has her girls dust the almost-never-used front parlor every day, and that's not a sign of anything except normal domestic life. It makes me wonder how much we project our own expectations back into the past, and how much we can really know about anyone's internal life.

And, finally, it's interesting in that light to read about the real lives of the All-of-a-Kind family girls: all went on to marry, eschewing or abandoning careers for lives as housewives (Taylor herself was a professional dancer for ten years and walked away from it as soon as she had a daughter)--but none replicated the giant family of their youth, either; most had only one child, a couple had two. I wonder whether that was by choice or by accident, and how their childhoods and the expectations of their era played into it.

I have vivid memories of checking this out from the Jackson Elementary Library when I was a kid. I think it's the descriptions of food. That always makes children's literature the most vivid for some reason.

Anyway, this holds up. I'm going to try to read the rest of the books in the series this time, which I definitely didn't do as a kid. It was just this one.