FAMILY SCRAPBOOK

A Jewish doctor who trades in the car for a pickup truck? The family glimpsed in these seven recollections must be a sociologist's nightmare, but then perhaps anomaly is part of Goffstein's charm. The sketches are mostly bare, first-person projections of glowing small moments, as when the family, riding along in the new pickup, sings the old camp song "Te-ell me wh-hy." But the last becomes a charming appreciation of Alberto Giacometti—surely among the least likely subjects for a children's picture book. As with a real family scrapbook, then, the oddly assorted entries will have different meaning for different members—and fond associations tucked between the lines.