From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family by June Cummins

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family by June Cummins Lois Rauch Gibson (bio) From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family. By June Cummins with Alexandra Dunietz. Yale University Press, 2021. The long-awaited biography of Sydney Taylor, by the late June Cummins, will be warmly received by all who have been waiting. Cummins's extensive research and access to family papers and interviews make From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family a definitive, scholarly biography. Despite the impressive forty pages of endnotes and seven-page bibliography, Cummins's book will also attract more general readers and fans of Taylor's books, like novelist Jennifer Weiner, who reviewed it for the New York Times (June 22, 2021 digital; July 4, 2021, print edition). Like Weiner, and like Cummins herself, I read and loved the All-of-a-Kind Family books as a child. Set in the early twentieth century, and published from the 1950s to the 1970s, the books appealed especially to readers of Wilder's Little House books and the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. But Taylor's books are about the immigrant experience in New York, and the family is Jewish. As Cummins notes in her introduction, these were the first books by a major publisher "to feature Jewish children and reach a widespread audience" (22). Though the first few chapters of the first book focus on events many children might experience—a lost library book, Mama's clever way of getting the girls to do household chores, a visit to Papa's junk shop, and a trip to buy candies with their saved-up pennies—the fifth chapter is about celebrating the Jewish sabbath. Cummins notes at several points that Taylor's editor wanted the books to seem more "American" than specifically Jewish. She insisted on changes to make this so. But Cummins also notes in her introduction that "Understanding why the series had such an impact requires knowledge of the historical and cultural environment in which its author grew up and the circumstances that shaped its publication" (22). She promises, "This biography not only recounts the life of a daughter of immigrants who achieved artistic and cultural success, but also shows how" her life and the books are directly connected to "the history of Jewish identity and of ethnic identity in children's books" (22). Cummins masterfully delivers on this promise. In each chapter, Cummins provides an astounding amount of background information, starting with the family history in chapter 1, which takes us back to nineteenth-century Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Taylor's parents grew up, met, [End Page 109] and married. In the chapter discussing All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown, we learn about Lillian Wald and the Henry Street Settlement. In the sections on Taylor leaving school, Cummins provides data on school attendance rates; and later, as Taylor selects schools for her daughter, Cummins enriches the section with the histories of the Bank Street College and Cooperative School for Teachers. Even the section on Cejwin, a summer camp where Taylor taught drama and dance for forty years, explores the history and background of the camp and its place in Jewish culture. This is indeed a biography that delves deeply into the life of Sydney Taylor as well as the world in which she lived. Many of Taylor's readers assume the stories are about her own family—as they are, to some extent. Taylor's parents, Cilly (Cecelia) Marowitz and Morris Brenner, were the prototypes for the parents; and the five sisters (Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, Gertie), who are all dressed alike (all of a kind) in immaculate outfits sewn by their German-born mother, were indeed based on Taylor and her sisters. Taylor was born Sarah Brenner and was the middle sister. But readers of the biography will discover that Taylor smoothed over the wrinkles in family life, just as her mother smoothed the wrinkles in the girls' dresses. While Mama in the books is firm but loving, and more elegant that the other mothers in their immigrant neighborhood, Cilly was...