"All-of-a-Kind" Essay

The author Melanie Rehak, whose recent subjects include Nancy Drew, revisits another childhood favorite, Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind-Family. Rehak's  wonderful essay runs in the latest edition of the online magazine Nextbook: A Gateway to Jewish Literature, Culture & Ideas. She writes,

In the same way that Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books have enraptured generations of young readers with their descriptions of the sacrifices the Ingalls family makes in order to forge a better life for themselves in a strange new part of their country, Taylor's books bring their readers along on another odyssey, one of assimilation in the promised land that America represented to European immigrants at the turn of the century.

All-of-a-Kind Family is still in print.  (See Powell's bookstore.) Another piece and a podcast at Nextbook consider Allan Sherman, of "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" fame.