Leaning Left: Progressive Politics in Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family Series

Known for evoking the past and emphasizing customs and traditions, both American and Jewish, Sydney Taylor (1904–78), author of the five-volume All-of-a-Kind Family series, has not been described as a leftist. Indeed, she is hardly seen as a political writer at all, as authors of entries in reference books highlight her "nostalgic charm" ("Sydney Taylor" 4:552) and her recounting of her "early history" and Judaism's "rich traditions and heritage" (Bloom). At times, she is even seen as reactionary. Editors Alison Cooper-Mullin and Jennifer Marmaduke Coye refuse to include All-of-a-Kind Family in their book Once Upon A Heroine: 450 Books for Girls to Love because "While for the most part it is a sweet story of five sisters, the culminating chapter is a celebration of the long-awaited birth of a boy.  No one can miss the implication that five sisters don't add up to one son" (xv). Taylor has not been grouped with writers such as Crockett Johnson or Carl Sandburg, who were known leftists and whose personal politics have been traced in their works for children. Yet not only was Taylor a socialist who leaned left for most of the years leading up to her writing of the books, but her progressivism influenced the All-of-a-Kind Family series in both overt and subtle ways.¹ As many of Taylor's readers may have guessed, the All-of-a-Kind Family books, which concern a large Jewish family with five daughters and one son living in New York City in the early twentieth century, are semi-autobiographical and only partially fictionalized accounts of Sydney Taylor's childhood. She is represented by the middle daughter, Sarah. Like Sarah, Taylor was the third of the five daughters.

As a child and teenager in the 1910s, Taylor was not yet a socialist, but in her early adulthood of the 1920s and through the 1940s, as a wife and mother, she first developed and then maintained leftist political sensibilities. Writing the All-of-a-Kind Family books from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, Taylor found canny means by which to retrofit her progressive values to memories of her presocialist youth. Dipping only slightly below the surface, we can see results of her artful blending of personal memory and political desire.

Taylor, like all authors who re-create their past through writing, relied, in part, on memory in order to construct her stories. Based on the differences between what we know of her childhood and what she wrote about in her children's books, we can surmise that she saw herself as having license to fictionalize her account of these memories as much as she liked, particularly given that the stories were billed as fiction rather than as memoir. Today, theorists of autobiography (who study not just "straight" autobiography but memoirs, confessions, "life-writing," and autobiographical fictions) assert that no author, no matter how pure his or her motives, can ever re-create the past as it actually was because memory is notoriously fickle, not to mention often inaccurate, and always mediated through the present. In recent years the field of autobiographical theory has become what Michael Stanislawksi terms an "enormous growth industry" as its practitioners engage both literary analysis and neuroscience in the attempt to understand how authors decide to reconstruct the past (14). Focusing specifically on Jewish writers but with an approach that applies to all autobiographical authors, Stanislawski explains that neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists believe the biochemical processes that constitute memory formation are distinct from those that interpret and make sense of the memories, with encoding and retrieving processes occurring in different parts of the brain. Arguing that "beliefs and emotions" color the encoding process, Stanislawski claims that "current goals and . . . knowledge of the world" also condition the writer's re-creation of the past (15). "Contemporary neuroscientists' understanding of memory," he explains, "supports the literary theorists' emphasis on the active role of the autobiographer in self-construction" (5). Invested as many of them are in...