THE BOOK OF LIFE - One of a Kind: The Life of Sydney Taylor

3:13AM Jan 7, 2025

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Aviva Rosenberg

Richard Michelson

Jo Taylor Marshall

Keywords:

Sydney Taylor

Jewish kidlit

All-of-a-Kind Family

picture book biography

Sydney Taylor Awards

multicultural books

Jewish history

Fanny Goldstein

Jewish Book Council

feminist pioneer

Martha Graham

Young Socialists

children's books

Jewish librarians

literary legacy

[COLD OPEN] All-of-a-Kind Family was just absolutely amazing. I wanted to be a part of Jo's family.

You are! [laughter]

I am! I've wormed my way in!

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz.

Sydney Taylor was the first author to write kids' books that served as windows into Jewish life, not just mirrors. Her All-of-a-Kind Family series was game changing. These were the first books about Jewish characters to become popular with readers of all backgrounds, and they are still popular today. Jo Taylor Marshall, Sydney's daughter, sponsors the Sydney Taylor Book Awards that recognize the best Jewish kidlit each year. And now Richard MIchelson has written a picture book biography of Sydney Taylor. It's called One of a Kind.

This picture book biography has inspired the Association of Jewish Libraries to create a Sydney Taylor portal on their website, to curate information and resources relating to Taylor, her writing, and the Sydney Taylor Book Awards. The project is in the works, and I'll be sure to let you know when it goes live.

I spoke with Jo Taylor Marshall and Richard Michelson at the 2024 Association of Jewish Libraries conference, where we were celebrating the 120th birthday of Sydney Taylor. If you'd like to hear more from Jo after listening to this podcast, you're in luck. I recorded an oral history with her, and I'll link to that in the show notes at BookOfLifePodcast.com.

Be sure to tune in next time to hear my exclusive interview with Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee Chair Aviva Rosenberg, who will tell us all about the winning titles for 2025. And don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter on Substack to join my community of Jewish kidlit fans. Get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news, and occasional calls to action right in your inbox. [END MUSIC]

It's the 120th birthday of Sydney Taylor this year, and Jo, may you live to 120.

To 240!

Oh, even better! I like it. Okay, so thank you for sponsoring the Sydney Taylor Book Awards and for always being such a welcome part of our community here at the Association of Jewish Libraries. And Rich, thank you also for being such an active part of this community and bringing us so many wonderful books. At this time, I've got the two of you together because you have now written a picture book biography of Sydney Taylor, Jo's mother. So explain how this book came to be.

Well, this book came to be because Jewish librarians have given me a Sydney Taylor Award previously on two occasions. On the first occasion, I took the opportunity to read the All-of-a-Kind Family, which I hadn't read as a child. Wasn't much of a reader as a child. So it was really exciting to me to see, first of all, how they stood the test of time, and second of all, how I could relate to the stories even now, it was just absolutely amazing. I wanted to be a part of Jo's family.

You are!

I am! I wormed my way in. And then when I was fortunate enough to win the second time, it was in Boston, and our mutual dear friend Lesléa Newman was on her way to have lunch with Joe and Mase and I happened, just by random luck, to be walking to my room when Lesléa passed by and said, "Hey, want to come to lunch with Jo and Mase with me?" I did, and I sat next to Jo, who you'll know if you watched a documentary that you did with her, it was just wonderful. To get to know her, to be around her energy and her joy of living balanced out my own kind of, you know, negative attitude in general. But I asked questions about her growing up and what it was really like, you know, as opposed to biography versus story. And she started telling me about all the amazing things that Sydney Taylor had done. She was part of the Young Socialists, one of the original Martha Graham dancers, acting off Broadway. And while she was telling me these stories, I was saying, "Oh my gosh, there needs to be a book written about it." I started formatting in my head, and then I was really worried, because I couldn't believe nobody else had done it before. I asked Jo, she said, "No, there's been no picture book." You know, you need to reintroduce books to every new generation. And I wanted to make sure that I introduced All-of-a-Kind Family to the next generation. And also, I just wanted to be part of that world, and Jo welcomed me in. That's why we're sitting here together.

Jo, there was another biography written for adult readers...

Correct.

...about your mother, From Sarah to Sydney. So now you've worked with two different authors writing two different kinds of biographies, one for adults and one for children, about your mother. Was the experience pretty much the same? Or was it different? Talk about that.

It was quite different. June Cummins was extremely kosher. We invited her to do research, so she would come and she would not eat except with paper plates. I rushed out and got Hebrew National hot dogs because I thought they answered to a higher authority. She wouldn't touch them because she said they weren't kosher enough. Now, my mother was more secular, so I was not raised kosher. I had no idea about kosher or that there were different degrees of kosherness. So we got tuna fish. I never ate so much tuna fish in my entire life. You could see how many days June Cummins had been with us by the tuna fish cans. But she was, she was really wonderful. She spent her life in the basement, because it was quiet there. So I'd bring down the tuna fish.

Was she at your house to look through old records, photos?

Yes, my mother had a trunk that was locked, and I never opened it. I had the key, but I never opened it, because I thought it would be invasive somehow, but I gave June the key. Well, what I learned about my mother! Things I never knew, and then I thought, gee, that's gonna make a good book. And June was a wonderful writer, and what she did in the adult book was to relate what was going on in the world to what was going on with my mother. Specifically, my mother was an original feminist. She fought for women's rights. The play Suffs that is now on Broadway, which has been produced by Hillary Clinton, about the suffragettes: that was the era my mother lived in. My parents met at a Young People's Socialist League. They called them the YPSL's, and that was like early communism, but it was more socialistic, and socialism was not a dirty word in those days. It was a wonderful story, because my father saw this lovely looking woman with blonde hair hanging down her back, and he said, Oh, I have to meet this lady. Well, she turned around and he said, Eh, she's not so gorgeous. My mother would hit him when he said that in later years!

But they were both well ahead of their time. Well, my father dressed any way he wanted. When Rich's book came out, the illustrator wanted to know, did he wear a tuxedo? Did he dress? No. At Cejwin Camps, the Jewish camp where they both, where my mother worked, in fact, the whole family practically worked there. My father would come up on weekends and he'd wear what he called his "Bermuda walking shorts." They were his jockey shorts! But they were both iconoclastic, and naturally, I grew up the same way. You can't live in a home with unusual people and not be unusual yourself. We lived in the Village, Martha Graham was upstairs and several other well known artists, and they were all visitors, all kinds of dancers and so on, visiting constantly. And Martha was always borrowing money from my father because modern dancers didn't make much.

I have one picture I'm very proud of, okay, of my mother. They're in a circle. It's in Barbara Morgan's book about Martha Graham. They're all bending down, and all you can see is their rear ends. And I would take my friends and point to one of the rear ends, and I would say, "That's my mother!"

So when Rich came to work on his book, did he do the same thing? Go to the basement and rifle through all the photos?

No, but we were in a lot of phone contact back and forth. At first I thought, how is he going to do this? There's so much detail, there's some stuff that is really a little bit spicy, to say the least.

In the adult book.

In the adult book. How is he going to sanitize it for kids? But he was so enthusiastic and so dedicated. And the more I talked to him, the more I felt he was the one to do this, and he was. I mean, the result is phenomenal.

Do you have a favorite illustration or a favorite scene in the picture book?

I really like them all, but my favorite is one that was a mistake. And I don't know if your podcast needs to know it, but it was the wrong word.

Well, now you've introduced the topic, I guess you should finish the story.

Well, it was a picture in a library, and it was supposedly all the writers, famous writers.

Oh, posters hanging on the wall of different authors.

One was supposed to be Virginia somebody maybe Virginia Woolf, I don't know.

Virginia, Hamilton.

They spelled Virginia wrong. Okay? So use your imagination, [laughter] but it was a word that I think the governor of Florida would have banned the book immediately. Rich and I were hysterical. The editor didn't think it was so funny.

Yeah, listening to Jo, you can see that was how my first lunch was with her, and why I wanted to write this book. I just said, you know, it's got to be done because Syd was really a fascinating person, and you could tell just by the way she raised Jo.

Also, she really kicked open the door for what we know today as the multicultural book movement. She wrote these books because little Jo said, "Why is there not stories about people like me, Jews, our holidays? Why is it always about Christmas?" And really, for me, personally, it bothers me to see these days that Jews are left out now, often, of that multicultural movement. While the stories were popular and the first stories about Jewish children that transcended just a small Jewish audience, I think still, she doesn't get the credit she deserves today for being a forerunner for what we all think of as natural or should be. Everybody should see themselves in stories. That was a radical idea at the time, really, what we see today in the whole, you know, windows and mirrors and other cultures. So I'm just so pleased to be able to champion that, because it's necessary in books. And just personally, as somebody who writes Jewish children's books, I'm standing on Sydney Taylor's shoulders.

The premise of the book, and he has made that so clear, and the theme runs through it: If you're a little girl growing up, you can be anything. You can be an actress, you can be a dancer, you can be an author. Maybe you can be president someday. And his book says that, in many ways. He did a phenomenal job. I am so grateful for him approaching me and asking for this. At first I was dubious, but now I'm thrilled. So thank you so much, Rich.

Thank you, and it brought us together. It's a friendship.

Yes, that's wonderful.

I've written a lot of biographies, and it's nice to have that, because you don't always end up in the same place.

Right. One more quick question. You are working on another picture book biography about another important Jewish literary figure. So will you tell us about that?

Next year in 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the Jewish Book Council and Jewish Book Month, and that was started by Fanny Goldstein in 1925, so I have written a biography about her. And in fact, what's really interesting to me when I was reading all Fanny's letters is that Sydney Taylor shows up in those letters.

Awesome!

So yeah, they were similar background experience. Also Fanny as a Jewish librarian, made sure in her library that there were books to support everybody in that neighborhood. When Blacks started moving into the neighborhood, she started adding books by Black authors. When there were Italians and Irish, she made sure that there were books by them, and when there were Asians, started moving into the neighborhood because Boston was a changing neighborhood like that, she made sure that everybody had books about themselves.

But first and foremost, she wanted to make sure that Jews also read books about Jews, because at the time, most of the Jews were so busy trying to assimilate that they didn't teach their children anything about Jewish history. And that went on for a long time, and I was guilty of that as well for my own children. I started writing Jewish books when my kids had to do, for school or for their bat and bar mitzvah, papers about their history, where they came from, and I realized how negligent I was in teaching them anything. I could name the queens and kings of England. I could tell you about Russian literature. I didn't know where my own grandfather came from. So I have been spending my life since that point trying to make up for that, trying to teach new generations. So I was thrilled to write about pioneers like Sydney Taylor and Fanny Goldstein, and I was absolutely thrilled to know that they knew each other.

Yes, that's even more special. Well, Fanny Goldstein is well known to us in the Association of Jewish Libraries, because we actually have a member award named the Fanny Goldstein Award for members who have been very active in the organization and in the field. And I actually got that award one time, so I...

Congratulations.

Thank you. That was a few years ago. So I'm a big fan of Fanny Goldstein, and she's also well known through the Jewish Book Council because they sponsor Jewish Book Month that grew out of Jewish Book Week, that she was the force behind. That's wonderful. So you're doing a great job in covering all of the bases of AJL and Jewish Book Council, and, you know, all of our organizations' important historic people. Thank you.

They need to be remembered, which is why it's so important that Jo has been such a sponsor of the Sydney Taylor award. If she hadn't, I wouldn't have taken the opportunity to read All-of-a-Kind Family, and what that added to my life is immeasurable.

Yeah, and I've heard that from other winning authors, that it's so special to them that it's the Sydney Taylor Award because it's a book that they connected with personally, many of them grew up reading it, and so to have that now become part of their writerly life is really special to them. So thank you, Jo.

Oh, you're very welcome. I'm delighted to be here and to be part of this ceremony, and I'm very honored and impressed by the judges. My God, they have to read thousands of books before they decide who the winner should be. So it's quite an amazing experience for me too.

Now we're gonna go sign books.

Yes, I know it's time for you guys to go sign autographs. So thank you for sitting down with me.

Everybody listening in. Buy a book, send it to us, we'll sign it.

Yes, that's right. All right. Thanks, you guys.

Thank you.

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] This is Aviva Rosenberg, chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to my grandmother, Nancy Klein, who has taught me over many years about the value of the written word and of Jewish continuity and remembering our history and a lot of other very important things. Thank you, Mama.

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack to join me in growing Jewish joy and shrinking antisemitic hate. Get show notes, transcripts, jewish kidlit news, and occasional calls to action right in your inbox. Sign up for the newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. You can also find The Book of Life on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon or making a one time donation to our home library, the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Learn more about AJL at JewishLibraries.org. Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading.