By Rachel Beerman

I love historical fiction. Time travel is my go-to answer to the question: “If you could have any super power what would it be?” As a young child, my favorite historical fiction book was All- of- a- Kind Family by the Jewish-American author Sydney Taylor (Sarah Brenner). The book follows the lives and adventures of five young Jewish sisters living in the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 1900s. Some of my own great-grandparents shared the Eastern Europe to Ellis Island to New York City path that I saw in the pages of All-of-a-Kind Family. My family and the book characters both experienced the sights and sounds of the Lower East Side with its peddlers, tenement houses, and families practicing their Jewish holidays and customs in a new world.

Although my own grandfather, Morris Beerman was born in Atlanta just 11 years after Syndey Taylor’s birth in NYC, his older brothers were born in NYC and did overlap with the author’s childhood on the Lower East Side. And try as I did get a clear picture of my family’s life from my grandfather, the answer to my question about what was lifelike for them on the Lower East Side was, “they worked hard, and we didn’t talk about it.”  But in the words of Sydney Taylor, I could see the world of my ancestors that I was so curious about.

It was years later, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, that I heard something that really resonated with me about why All-of-a-Kind Family was the book that I re-read so happily every year of my childhood. One day at school our guest author Zetta Elliott told my students that books are both mirrors and windows. They allow us to see ourselves and to see others. And Elliott said, most importantly, we need both mirrors and windows on our bookshelves. In the case of Taylor’s books, they provided a mirror for Jewish children. After her first book was published in 1951, Jewish children had, for the first time, a children’s novel published by a mainstream publisher who centered Jewish characters doing things like celebrating shabbat and Passover while also going to the public library and visiting Coney Island to beat the summer heat. All- of- a- Kind Family was my mirror book, or at least a mirror into my family’s past. But as Elliot said, books are also important because they are windows. For over 70 years, the books of Sydney Taylor have allowed non-Jewish children to become friends with the book’s Jewish characters, learning about their lives along the way and helping to show that Jewish families are indeed part of the American fabric.

My appreciation of Taylor deepened this past year, when I read the only biography written about Taylor, Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of- a- Kind Family.  In the book author June Cummins delves into how the writing of the All-of-a-Kind series allowed Taylor to pull from her own complicated life to create the stories that appeared in the five books. These multiple identities: female, Jewish, American, artist, political activist, all intersect in Taylor’s stories, and as Cummins argues, were influential in creating books that would help create a national Jewish identity here in America. As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, I am grateful for Syndey Taylor and the joyful impact she has had on my own life, on the lives of my children, and on all the Jewish and non-Jewish children who have had their lives enriched through the reading of her books. And I am also grateful to June Cummins for her biography of Syndey Taylor who reminds us that every woman’s story is complex and that their stories should be told.

Rachel is Manager of Community Relations for the Buffalo Jewish Federation.