The Judgment of Yoyo Gold
An excerpt from Isaac Blum's new YA coming of age novel
Editor’s Note:
When writing Orthodox Jewish characters for YA readers that are not in the Orthodox world, balancing mainstream relevance and authenticity is hard. There are some stories with little nuance where characters are written as brave or admirable for simply abandoning their faith after a glimpse of the ‘real’ world. This is not the case in The Judgment of Yoyo Gold. Yoyo (Yocheved) is wholly new, a type of character that we haven’t seen before. In Yoyo, Blum has created a complex and relatable character that is accessible to readers of any background. In Yoyo’s struggles, readers can see themselves since she is faced with many of the same pressures that girls outside the Orthodox world face in addition to those that are specific to her community. She also questions the worldview in which she was raised in a way that feels authentic and in her questioning serves as a guide for the reader of that world. Where will Yoyo’s new discoveries eventually lead her? Only a Yoyo book 2 would reveal that!
Erica
Excerpt from The Judgment of Yoyo Gold
PROLOGUE
Hindsight is supposed to make everything clear. But when I think back, I’m still not sure how much of it was my fault. I’m trying to be easier on myself, so I won’t accept all of the blame. But I have to take at least some of it.
Because I should have recognized what was happening to Esti. The signs were all there.
My father always says it’s a slippery slope.That’s why strict observance is so important: once you do one non-observant thing, you’ve taken a step down the slope, and that leads to more non-observant things, and before you know it you’re sliding uncontrollably into a sick world of secular depravity. Or, in Esti’s case, you’re on a plane to Las Vegas, which I guess is kind of the same thing.
I, of all people, should have picked up on the signs. I’m the rabbi’s daughter, and I’m expected to set an example, to help guide my peers. But maybe your best friend is a blind spot, like that space alongside a car that the mirror doesn’t show. That’s why they have those electronic sensing systems on cars. But they don’t have those for best friends.There was no Esti-shaped warning light that flashed when she did stuff she wasn’t supposed to.
Because it would have gone off when Esti cut her hair short and dyed it purple.
It would have gone off when she suggested that we find a basement or parking lot that was “both dark and remote” in which to try marijuana.
It would have gone haywire when she kissed Ari Fischer in a field. That one set the whole community abuzz. Everybody was talking about her. My father was calling me into his office on a regular basis, asking me to fix the problem.
“Ari’s tongue is very slippery,” Esti explained to me. “I thought it might be more like a cat’s tongue, you know? Where it’s kind of rough and grippy.”
We were having this conversation in the street. It was Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest, and we were walking home from our friend Shira’s house. Our town is almost all Orthodox, and observant Jews don’t drive on the Sabbath.
“Why would you think that?” I asked her. “Because, you see, Esti, you also have a human tongue. Is your tongue grippy, like a cat’s?”
“That’s a great point. You know, Yoyo, it’s a good thing I keep you around.”
And she kept talking about Ari, but I tuned it out, because we were supposed to be good Orthodox girls. And that meant that we didn’t kiss boys. We didn’t talk to boys. We made sure not to be alone in the same room as boys.
Suddenly there was a car coming. Esti was wandering into the middle of the road, lost in her thoughts of Ari. As the car blared its horn, I pulled her out of the street onto the sidewalk.
“See?” Esti said, coughing at the car’s lingering fumes. “We’d all be roadkill if not for you. I’d just be a smear on the pavement without my Yoyo. Do you think Ari would still love my mangled, disfigured corpse? I think he would.”
“Did you just say . . .‘love’?”
“Yeah,” she said casually, almost matter-of-fact. “He loves me. And I love him. He’s my bashert.”
That’s when my internal alarm system finally went off. I panicked. I scrambled. “No. No. Esti. You can’t know that. You can’t. Only HaShem knows that.”
From the Torah, we know lots of the things God wants. He wants us to follow the dietary laws of kashrut and keep kosher. He wants us to do chesed and help others. He wants us to marry Jewish men and raise studious Jewish children. But these are all general things, the things he wants of the Jews, of his people. The Torah doesn’t say anything about specific individuals. So we know what God wants of women, but we don’t know what he wants from any given woman. The Torah is mum on the subject of what I should have for lunch, and it doesn’t say a word about whom Esti Saperstein is supposed to marry.
“That’s not for you to decide,” I said. “That decision is reserved for HaShem.”
“It doesn’t feel like a decision,” Esti explained. She kicked a piece of gravel along the sidewalk in front of her. “It just is. Your dad said.”
“No, he did not say—”
“He said to think of the coming together with your bashert not as a union but as a reunion, right? You are two half-souls that have been missing from each other, so HaShem brings you back together.”
“I know. I know. But who are you to just decide that he’s your other half ? Just because you feel something?” I dug deep and tried to channel my father’s religious wisdom. “Tell me: In the Torah, did Yitzhak and Rivka make textural observations about each other’s oral anatomy and fall in love? No. Eliezer, as a messenger of HaShem, arranged their marriage.”
Esti just shrugged. She shrugged at her best friend. She shrugged at God and his Torah. That’s when I knew how bad it was. And I also knew that it was too late. Esti was too far down, and the slope too slippery.
“You don’t understand. You’ve probably never had a feeling this . . . powerful,” Esti explained. “I had my hand on his face, and I could feel his heartbeat, his pulse, and everything in the world was one big explosion, like a bomb, a big one. It’s a good thing we were in a secluded area. Otherwise, there would have been casualties.”
A few days later, Esti moved to Las Vegas to attend a boarding school.
And in those first few surreal days, when Esti was gone, but before the loss of my best friend really hit me, I kept thinking back to that metaphor, the bomb. Because it was a big bomb and there was at least one casualty.
Me.
Esti exploded my whole life.
Excerpted from The Judgement of Yoyo Gold with the permission of the author. The Judgment of Yoyo Gold is published by Philomel Books, October 2024
Note from the author on writing about faith:
Yoyo has been raised in a religious family, but faith is inherently personal, and Yoyo has to figure out what she believes in her heart. She has to decide how much–if any–of her family and community’s religion is for her. According to Gallup polling, 70% of Americans say that religion and faith are “very important to them,” while half of American families belong to a place of worship. So while Judaism is a minority religion, Yoyo’s journey through faith is a universal struggle. But there is little representation of that common but often overlooked part of the adolescent experience in fiction. I wanted my novel to give that personal journey of faith the attention it deserves.
And on writing from a different (gender) POV:
My first novel, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, is told from the perspective of a teenage boy. Writing from a teen girl’s perspective presented a fun set of challenges. I had to think about the differences in the way these two narrators would see and experience the world. It was interesting to think about how their voices would be different, which things would be most important to them, or the way their senses of humor might differ. Even the way they thought about their love interests had to be different, and that process was interesting, exciting, and rewarding.
Isaac Blum is an award-winning author and educator. His debut novel, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and won the William C. Morris Award from the American Library Association. His second novel, The Judgment of Yoyo Gold, was published in October 2024. You can visit him online at isaacblumauthor.com and follow him on Instagram at @isaacblum_.
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Five Tiny Delights
the morning’s first cup of coffee
the birds in my backyard, especially the goldfinches
when the Philadelphia Eagles win
the morning’s second cup of coffee
reading in bed
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Five Tiny Jewish Delights
every novel by Chaim Potok and EL Konigsburg
rye bread
meeting another Jew, anywhere in the world, and feeling like I know them
everything about Rosh Hashanah
arguing (you might say this is not a Jewish thing–or that it’s a stereotype–but I’ll argue with you that you’re wrong, and the argument will delight me.)
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