All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown by Sydney Taylor

Eager to comfort Jo, who felt lonely at nighttime in bed, Taylor told her daughter stories about her own childhood in a family where loneliness was unheard of, since five sisters shared the same bedroom. When Jo was seven, Taylor resumed her interest in the arts, serving for much of her life as a dance and dramatics counselor at Camp Cejwin, the Jewish cultural and learning institution in upstate New York where her sister Ella (and later her other sisters) worked.Īlthough Taylor wrote several other children’s stories as well as plays (which she also directed and choreographed), nothing equaled the invention stimulated by her recollection of her own childhood as the middle daughter in a household rich in love, learning, and tradition. Despite her successful career, she became a full-time wife and mother after the birth of her only child, Joanne (Jo), in 1935. In 1925, she married pharmacist and businessman Ralph Taylor and became first an actor with the Lenox Hill Players in New York City from 1927 to 1929, then a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company during the early 1930s. Her formal schooling ended two years into high school, with subsequent night school and other courses of study.

The family was observant but not Orthodox in their Jewish practice, and Taylor and her siblings attended public school. While still a teenager, Sarah changed her name to Sydney, the moniker she used in her creative professional life. Taylor was the middle sister of five, with three younger brothers, one of whom died in infancy. Morris ran a junk shop and a rag and textile business, while the bulk of the growing family’s day-to-day responsibilities fell to Cecilia.

Her parents, Morris and Cecilia, of Polish and German descent, emigrated from Germany in 1901, part of a substantial wave of Jewish immigrants during that era.

Taylor was born on October 30, 1904, and grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side.

All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown by Sydney Taylor