When it came to finding a critical or scholarly review about a book there was one question to ask myself after an article is located. Do you find the article, read it and then read the book or do you find the article, read the book and then read the article? When I found the article "Becoming an "All-of-a-Kind" American: Sydney Taylor and strategies of assimilation, I decided to read the article first. Being a critical review of Taylor’s book All-of-a-Kind Family I believe that much of what I had read in the article contributed to the way I read the book.
In the article, June Cummins takes a look at the first book in a series of five and “focuses both on its depictions of positive Jewish cultural identification and on its treatment of cultural assimilation during a period when large numbers of immigrant Jews were moving into American society”. From reading the article I realized that these were two things I needed to focus on as I read the text and these were important to all readers. If I hadn’t read this article, the prominence of Jewish cultural identification would have exceeded the portrayal of an immigrant family assimilating to American ways. Just like Cummins explains, there is a lack of assimilation which was very important to all immigrants of this time. Cummins says “the characters do not discuss changes to their lifestyles or values, and no incidents occur that point to the acculturation process”.
Throughout the article, Cummins discusses the differences between the manuscript that is available to read and the actual printed book. For example, Cummins says in the manuscript there is a detail description of the fourth of July and its importance to America but it is taken on in the printed book. Apparently the editorial process can really affect what goes into the book. I think that it would have been important to have the meaning of the fourth of July explained in the text to one of the characters because this would have highlighted some of the assimilation to the American culture. But I would have never made this connection if it wasn’t for reading this critical review.
Overall this review has allowed me to get inside a critics head and the authors head and enabled me to read the book in a different way. To much contribution, I noticed many qualities as well as possible issues that All-of-a-Kind Family may have with its readers and without this article I would not have been able to think with such a critical eye. Scholarly reviews and critics are important to reviewing literature of any kind and can contribute to the way a text is read and used by its readers; it can enlighten readers to new ideas and possible complications and this will help supply children with a selection of quality multicultural literature where they can appreciate and learn from others
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