The one where the family prepares for Sabbath.
Listen to the episode
Join hosts Merav and Batya as they delve into all things All-of-a-Kind Family. This two-part episode features special guest Terri Ash of Geek Calligraphy, talking about bundle buggies, pickles, the kashrut and sanitary concerns of an open air market, using the library as a transition point, and the priest that lives in Terri’s house (hint, it’s her husband!).
Our chapter in summary
Just this once, Mama takes all the girls to market with her on a Thursday afternoon to shop for the Sabbath. The family stops in the library, then spends a busy time at the market seeing all the offered goods at shops and pushcarts and making their purchases. Then Friday comes, and the family brings in the Sabbath together.
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Terri Ash: Geek Calligraphy
Geek Calligraphy is a woman-owned business co-founded by Ariela Housman (she/her) and Terri Ash (she/her) in 2015. Ariela and Terri are committed to providing high quality art, exceptional customer service, and halakhically sound ketubah texts to geeks across the spectrum in a respectful and inclusive manner. Find them here and take home some unique Jewish art today! Hire Terri to wrangle your arts and crafts https://www.artistwrangling.com/
Synagogue
Papa observes the tradition of going to synagogue on Friday night. He most likely also returns to synagogue on Saturday morning and may also return Saturday evening to say the combined afternoon and evening prayers. Papa belongs to the Orthodox tradition of Judaism, where in this time period women generally didn’t attend regular prayer services.
Ella’s future acting career
Real-life Ella Brenner was a performer and singer throughout her life, performing in vaudeville in her late teens and twenties before her first marriage. Ella’s forays into the theatrical life are more thoroughly chronicled in Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family, the fifth and last book in the series. Sydney Taylor’s notes show that she intended to write a book for each of the Brenner daughters featured in the original books, but her untimely death means we’ll never be treated to what would doubtless have been the shenanigan-filled Henny of All-of-a-Kind Family. Maybe there’s a draft somewhere?
Yiddish accented English
Not just the accent, but also syntax, word order and word choices make up the familiar eastern-European dialect of a generation of Jews who were parents and grandparents in the era from All-of-a-Kind family through the period of our own childhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. Hear the sound in Yiddish here.
This is also the sound of early North American Jewish humor and shows up in the telling of a huge number of Yiddish inflected jokes. (Content warning for farcical violence, bathroom humor, holocaust reference).
Regional accents and how they reflect cultural markers through speech
There are a huge number of UK English accents alone, as well as regional accents in North America and everywhere else English is spoken, which connote class and cultural markers to the listener. When doing translations, it’s common practice to substitute one set of regional markers for another so that the same kinds of cultural assumptions are evoked.
Giving kids permission to be themselves
Setting up kids for success by encouraging them not to hide personality traits is a key foundation of a lot of modern programs for children, founded predominantly in movements like Montessori which teach kids the fundamentals of life not through drilling on facts but through gentle exposure to the parts of life they’ll experience as bigger kids and adults. Taylor frequently projects the educational cutting edge of the 1950s back into the 1910s of her childhood setting, giving agency to Mama and Papa that they probably didn’t have in real life.
Double portion for the Sabbath
In the biblical narrative of the first shabbat spent in the Sinai desert the man, or manna, which fell from heaven during the first week fell in a double portion on the day before shabbat, allowing the people to gather enough that no labor would be necessary on the sabbath and the former slaves from Egypt could know their first true day of rest. Modern Jews symbolize this bounty by including a second braided bread for the blessing on Friday night and throughout the sabbath.
Doylist and Watsonian explanations
This term is taken from discussion of Sherlock Holmes stories, as a way of illustrating two perspectives. One is that of our narrator, Dr. John Watson; the other is that of the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While Doyle would be able to talk about his own choices as an author in creating the narrative, Watson’s perspective is within the narrative, and cannot include the existence or motivations of an author. (Two good sources for learning more: the TVTropes and Fanlore pages on the subject.)
Gut shabbes and shabbat shalom
Sabbath greetings vary from community to community, including the familiar shabbat shalom (“sabbath of peace” or “a peaceful sabbath”), and the traditional Yiddish gut shabbes which means simply “good sabbath.” Almost all of these greetings are a form or blessing or wishing the other person to experience the blessing and rest brought by the sabbath.
What is Shalom Aleichem?
Long before it was the pen name for a Yiddish writer, it was a common greeting in Hebrew and Yiddish — and in the 16th or 17th century it was written into this liturgical song for Friday nights. In this video you can hear a traditional melody to this song, composed in 1918 by Brooklyn resident Israel Goldfarb, and an explanation of the tradition of angels visiting to see whether preparations for the sabbath have taken place. The song has four phases, a greeting, a welcoming, a request for blessing, and a goodbye, so that the angels who have come to visit are properly acknowledged. There are many more tunes for Shalom Aleichem, and you can hear some of them at The Song Shul.
Shalom Aleichem is traditionally sung before Friday night kiddush, the prayer over wine. In many households, in between Shalom Aleichem and kiddush comes the Eishet Chayil, a a passage of verses from Proverbs (not Psalms, oops) in praise of one’s wife.
Reading together on Friday evenings
In many families that observe shabbat, Friday night after dinner is an excellent time to catch up on reading. Once the food is put away, people settle into comfortable chairs and sofas and quietly read together, sometimes reading aloud profound or more often funny passages, as laughter indicates that there’s something to be shared with the larger group. Reading is done by whatever light is available until bedtime.
Keeping shabbat at different levels of strictness
What does it mean to keep shabbat? Many families put away electronics, put on special clothes, eat special meals, and attend synagogue on shabbat, but some people observe shabbat in their own ways, choosing to spend the time with family and friends, and certainly away from their daily grind, whether that’s a job or school. All levels of shabbat observance can be meaningful with intention and a sense of why you keep the tradition.
Rabbinical families and intersection with different Jewish traditions
What is a rabbinic lineage? In Chassidic dynasties and often in other Jewish traditions there are families where one rabbi trains and teaches rabbis for the next generation. This could be a blood relative like a son or nephew, or a person from outside the family with the affinity for the kind of practical and mystical work inherent in the rabbinic role. You can read about this kind of family in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s In My Father’s Court.
Understanding the “feeling” of shabbat through traditional stories
Many Chassidic stories and songs center on shabbat. Themes include the mystical “sabbath bride”; the powerful idea of the impossible made possible by faith (such as spending shabbat in Jerusalem by means of impossibly fast travel from Safat, in a tale told by followers of the Ari and Baal Shem Tov); and a profound inner understanding of shabbat having a fundamentally different nature. This last is illustrated by one tale of a small boy knowing it must be shabbat “because the light was different,” and by this classic about sharing the “taste of shabbat” with someone from outside our tradition.
Using the Havdalah ceremony to separate the sabbath from the weekdays
Havdalah is the last part of the sabbath, and the transition is marked, just as the start is, with good smells, fire and wine. While shabbat ends at nightfall (when the sky is wholly dark), some people like to extend shabbat further into Saturday night and not make havdalah until later. There is a tradition that you can extend shabbat as far as Wednesday — but only as far as Wednesday, since you need to leave time on Thursday and Friday to prepare for next shabbat!
Giving honorary family status to adults close to the family
Did you grow up calling someone “Aunt” or “Uncle” only to be confused when you grew up and discovered that they weren’t a blood relation? This is a reasonably common phenomenon in many families, and speaks to the reality of adult friendships growing to include their entire families, acknowledging the shared importance of that bond.
Tenement shaped dollhouses in local parks
Personal toys in this era were few and far between. Remember how Sarah is saving up for a doll in chapter 1? As a result, the public parks movement and the NYC Department of Parks took it on themselves to provide toys to spark imagination in the public spaces, from climbing equipment to dollhouses that resembled the tenements children lived in.
Body shaming and “acting like a lady”
While we don’t see a lot of body shaming in our text, the All-of-a-Kind Family books model a behavior set for both mother and children, but a lot of us grew up with the double standards of “clean your plate” and “you’re putting on weight!” These kinds of comments from parents and other family members can instill lifelong shame and feelings of inadequacy, and in extreme cases lead to eating disorders or self-harm. When deeply internalized you may even find them coming out of your own mouth and directed towards others who don’t meet your parents’ standards.
Composite characters in stories
Sometimes the truth doesn’t make the best story, and in order to tell a better one, we take pieces of real events and bring them together to support the narrative through-line of what we want to say. This can mean combining people we’ve known in real life into composites or cognate characters, where we smash together different elements from real people to make an imagined person with more deliberately chosen plotlines and characteristics than their real life inspirations.