Sydney Taylor, author of the beloved series of All-of-a-Kind Family books, also wrote this story of a Jewish Hungarian family living in a newly constituted Czechoslovakia just after the end of World War I. The family consists of Mama and her two daughters, Szerena, about 12 years old, and Gisella, age 8. (As far as I can find, the book never gives their exact ages.) The family has a papa, too, but he has been absent in America for seven years, most of Gisella’s life. In fact, Gisella doesn’t even remember her papa, and whenever she thinks about him, she mostly feels some mixture of confusion and resentment. Gisella longs to have a “papa like everyone else”, but she does not want to leave her village, the only home she has ever known, and go to America to join a papa she doesn’t really know at all.
The story paints a vivid picture of life in a small Eastern European village. The girls celebrate holidays, Jewish holidays like Passover and Sabbath, and also secular Hungarian holidays like May Day. They herd and pick the feathers from their geese, help Mama spin the flax into linen, raise silkworms, go to school, and help with all of the multitude of tasks to be done on a small family homestead. And all the while they are anticipating their eventual journey to New York City where Papa is living. Mama has had to take care of her girls mostly by herself all through the war and its aftermath, and she and Szerena are looking forward to the time when Papa will have enough money saved for them to join him in America.
This year-in-the-life-of book reminds me a little bit of All-of-a-KInd Family, except for the fact that in this story Papa is absent and the community is a rural village in Hungarian Czechoslovakia. A Papa Like Everyone Else also reminds me of Kate Seredy’s The Good Master and The Singing Tree, set in rural Hungary at about the same time period, during World War I. These books are so wonderfully descriptive of Hungarian and Jewish life during that time. I felt transported to another place and time.
Even though it might be a difficult book for any child who is missing a beloved father, deployed perhaps or just having to travel for work, A Papa Like Everyone Else might also be cathartic for children in that situation. And everyone can enjoy the depiction of farm life and Jewish life with just enough detail about how the family make plum preserves, lechwar, or how they fatten the geese by force feeding them, or how they do all the other tasks that support their meager, but also rich, family and community life.
A few content considerations: A robber comes when the family is away from home and steals almost all of their possessions. This robber is said to be a “gypsy”, and the constable slaps one of the Roma suspects, showing the usual contempt and prejudice that was current at the time for Roma people. One of GIsella’s cousins is whipped by the schoolteacher for the cousin’s lack of preparation for his lessons. And a neighbor shoots the fox that has come to steal the chickens and geese in the barn.
All’s well that ends well as Gisella and Szerena and Mama do leave the village and go to join Papa in America. The ending, in case you’re a reader of endings, is:
“As Papa caught them both in his strong arms, the girls buried their faces against his dark jacket, too overwhelmed to speak. Gisella thought, Szerena and I aren’t orphans with only a Mama to love, anymore. We’re a real family now–a family with a mama and a papa.
Papa knelt down and tipped Gisella’s chin up.
“Papa!” she whispered in shy happiness. “Oh, Papa!”
A Papa Like Everyone Else would be a perfect read aloud book for Father’s Day (or really anytime). Maybe it would give us all a renewed appreciation for our own fathers.
