[COLD OPEN] I think that fundamentally, the world has to be worth saving, because if it's not, what are you gonna do? Are you just gonna sit on your couch and wait for everything to fall down around your ears? I don't think that that's even possible for human beings. I think we, frankly, want to survive more than that.
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. A World Worth Saving by the award winning author Kyle Lukoff is a fantasy adventure that explores trans identity and Jewish mythology. A trans boy and an unusual golem must save the world from demons who inflict transphobia on humans, and they've got to do it by Yom Kippur. This is an action packed story with real world insight. It's kind of heartbreaking and heartwarming, and it's got the most interesting golem with the most personality of any that I've seen. For show notes, a transcript and links to more about Kyle's work, subscribe to my newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com, where you'll also find bonus content like Jewish kidlit news and calls to action, or you can visit my full website at BookOfLifePodcast.com. [END MUSIC]
Kyle Lukoff, welcome to The Book of Life.
Thank you for having me.
I was moved to interview you by your new novel, A World Worth Saving. But I'd like to put it into the context of your other works. You are perhaps best known for your picture book When Aidan Became a Brother, and your first novel, award winning novel, Too Bright to See. Both of those actually won multiple awards. Can you talk just a little bit about your journey as a writer?
Sur. It is interesting to me to see how my career has grown over the years, and how many different kinds of books I have gotten to write, and yet how so much of the attention is still always on my more trans themed books, which isn't a bad thing. But I always like to take opportunities like this to plug my first picture book, which was called A Storytelling of Ravens and is about collective nouns. And then the second book that I actually sold, it came out after Aiden, but it is called Explosion at the Poem Factory, and for the last several months, I've been thinking about how it is something of an anti AI screed, and about how art can only really come from human beings, and that outsourcing art to machines can only ever lead to disaster.
I love that.
Yeah. And after those two I published When Aiden Became a Brother, which got me a fair amount of attention, and then once Too Bright to See came out, you know, I was really off to the races. But my two more recent picture books are called Just What to Do, and I'm Sorry You Got Mad. And as per this podcast, I also want to plug I'm Sorry You Got Mad as a great Yom Kippur gift if such a thing exists, which I know it doesn't, but it is really a book about not just how to apologize, but how to grow into someone who fully understands what they've done and what that means for their relationships with others.
I definitely want to talk more about that book later.
Sure.
So you've written everything from board books to picture books to easy readers to novels. So first of all, mazel tov on being so flexible and multi talented...
Thank you. It's because I get bored really easily.
[LAUGHTER] Okay, well, it works for the readers. Is there anything that ties all of your writing together?
I think the only thing that really ties all of my books together, with maybe the exception of A Storytelling of Ravens, but maybe not even then, is that it is hard to be a person. I have always found it very hard to live in a world with other people, because other people are complicated and confusing, and I am also complicated and confusing, and I use my books as a way to explore the nitty gritty of conflicts and human relationships and how different people can bounce off of each other and have their own experiences of the world. I think that ties all of my books together, really, more than anything else.
Okay. Well, with that context, let's hear about A World Worth Saving. So what is it about and what inspired this story?
Yeah, so A World Worth Saving is kind of a tricky book to describe. On the one hand, it is in many ways, your very classic quest narrative where the 14 year old main character is spurred to run away from home by both supernatural and interpersonal forces, and he discovers that his personal woes are tied up into something much bigger and more sinister. I've been describing it kind of as if Percy Jackson was trans and Jewish, which I don't think Rick Riordan would mind, because he blurbed it for me. But I also end up tapping into something much deeper than that about the concepts of liminal spaces, the power that comes from self transformation and the value that can be found in what would otherwise be discarded.
For people who haven't had a chance to read it, can you sort of give a little quick book talk of what actually happens in this story?
Yeah, so we meet the main character, who's a 14 year old trans boy named A, and we learn very quickly that his parents are not supportive of his identity at all, and they've been taking him to a kind of like conversion therapy support group run by a woman who seems a little bit more evil than is normal. A then meets a golem who appears to him, constructing itself entirely out of trash and litter that it's found around the place, and tells A that he has a much bigger role to play in the bad things that have been happening in his city and in his community. So at the first opportunity, he and his friend defeat some evil and they run away from their parents, and then the rest of the book is them figuring out how to save their friend who has disappeared, and also how to maybe do something a little bit more than just helping one person, how maybe they can tear out some of this, like anti trans bias at the root.
I really enjoyed the way that this kind of activism is mixed with the fantasy elements, and I want to hear more about the supernatural elements of this story. So can you talk about the shaydeem and the golem that you've created, how you adapted them from folklore into what you needed for this story?
Well, at first I really thought that it was a golem, but I realized that it actually departed too far from folklore about golems for me to feel comfortable saying, like, Yes, this is a golem. I know that folklore is just stories told by people, and that I have a right to adapt or change those stories as I see fit, because I don't think that golem are real. So I do get to make things up about them, since fundamentally, everything that we know about golems is something that someone has made up. I also thought that it would be interesting and also very much in line with the themes of the book, to play with this idea of, what are you if you are not what people say that you are, or what if people told you that you were one thing, and you're realizing that maybe that word doesn't fully encompass everything that you could be. And so the golem itself has its own little journey of identity alongside the characters, which I thought was really fun, and then with the shaydeem, the word for demons in Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, that was something that I knew very, very little about before I started to write this book. I will say that I did not intentionally depart from traditional folklore. I simply did not know very much about it, and I kind of did that on purpose, because I didn't want to box myself into only what other people said that they were. So what I did was I listened to one podcast called Throwing Sheyd, which was great, and I think I read a few other sources, and then I took what I learned and I just decided to adapt them in ways that made sense for the story, hopefully nothing too outside the realm of the space that I was playing in, but still suiting my story as needed.
So the golem, or whatever it is, tells A "you are in the midst of your own creation, which gives you strength beyond imagining." And a book review on the Mombian blog suggests that this mindset could be life altering for young people, perhaps especially for trans youth. Can you talk about what the golem meant by this?
Sure. So do you mind if I just read from the epigraph at the beginning of the book?
That would be great!
This is my first book with an epigraph, and it actually has two. The first one is a Yiddish saying "Mir veln zey iberlebn," which translates to "we will outlive them." And then the second one is a quotation from a friend of mine, Julian K. Jarboe, which says, "God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: because he wants humanity to share in the act of creation." I've loved that quotation for a very, very long time. I realized that in some ways, that quotation really frames the entire book, and it also connects to something that my childhood rabbi told me many years ago. You know, I'd been Bat Mitzvah at 13, and then I moved to New York when I was 18, and this was maybe 10 years later. I was visiting my childhood synagogue for my ex girlfriend's wedding, and I introduced myself. I reminded him who I was. I said, you know, I didn't look like this when I was young, I transitioned several years ago. And he nodded. He asked me if I was dating anyone, and I said, No. And then he said, you know, it is a, it is a holy thing to find your own path, and that's the only thing that he ever said about my transition. He simply told me that it was a holy thing that I was doing, and I decided that I agreed with him, and I wanted to put that message into a book in a much firmer and more thoroughly fleshed out way.
That's beautiful.
I'd never really read the Talmud until relatively recently. There's that app Sefaria that has, like every Jewish book, that you can just get on your phone. And that was when I learned that the first real argument in the Talmud is rabbis arguing about when you should say the Shema. When is it nightfall? Like, when is day? When is night? When it is too late? I thought that that idea of arguing about, when is one thing this other thing, or like, when is it permissible to perform this mitzvah in that space between day and night, I found that to be a really powerful framing for my own thoughts about the special nature of the times in between.
I love that. Is this your first book that draws on your Jewish identity?
I think it is my first book with any Jewish character ever. And I sure did dive in headfirst! When I first started writing it, I thought that it was going to be somewhat incidentally Jewish. I thought that the main character would be Jewish in the way that I was, growing up. Which is to say, fairly isolated from any sense of Jewish community and without much education. But then the rest of the story would be sort of your standard quest that would draw from other folklore. And the more I wrote it, the more Jewish it became. The novel then required that I become more deeply invested in my Jewishness too, which was an interesting process, and is still an interesting process that is ongoing.
So writing the book actually impacted your own personal sense of identity?
I think so, yeah.
Wow.
I think it just made me feel more Jewish.
Wow. Very cool. A World Worth Saving takes place during the High Holidays and your recent picture book, I'm Sorry You Got Mad also works really well as a Yom Kippur story, even though it's not explicitly about that, because of its theme of apology. So tell us more about I'm Sorry You Got Mad.
Sure, so I'm Sorry You Got Mad. might be my favorite of my books so far. It is a picture book told entirely in the form of letters from one kid to another. The first letter just says "Sorry," and then I think the third note says, "I'm sorry you got so mad, but it wasn't my fault." And then as the letters progress, we learn more and more about what exactly happened that made this kid have to apologize, and why he made that choice, and what it means to really take accountability for your actions and repair your relationship with the person that you hurt. It was a lot of fun to write. It just kind of flowed out of me very naturally. I'm really thrilled with how well it's been received by educators, parents, children, everyone, really.
Did you have Yom Kippur in mind when you wrote it?
No, I just think about apologizing a lot, because, like I said earlier, my work all tends to deal with those sticky places in between people, and I tend to fixate on the ways that I have hurt people and what I can do about it, and also on the ways that people have hurt me, and what I wish that they would do about it. So this is just something that I think about all the time. And not even like a bitter, like, this person did this to me, and I need them to say, sorry. It's more like, Oh, I'm curious about how those actions made me feel, and I'm curious about what would make me feel better, and I'm curious about why they might not realize that this is still impacting our relationship, like that sort of thing.
So the High Holidays themes of both of these books is making me wonder if that time of year is particularly important to you, or if not, do have a different favorite Jewish holiday?
You know, growing up, we were definitely High Holidays Jews. We rarely went to Shabbos, but we pretty much went to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur every year. And then I didn't go for many, many years, until I was in my late 20s or early 30s in New York. And I started going to the High Holiday services at CBST, Beit Simchat Torah in New York. And it just became very important to me. It just feels like a very powerful time of year, a very texturally rich time of year where there's so much to think about and ponder and consider and wonder. I do think that it is probably my favorite Jewish holiday. I mean, I actually really love Yom Kippur. I know that I say this in the book; it is possible that I made it up, but I probably didn't. I probably didn't. I probably read it somewhere, but I really think of Yom Kippur as a blessing, right? Like I think that it is a wonderful thing to be given the chance to think about how you treat the people in your life and what you want to do about it. I try to apologize to someone when I have to, and not just in those 10 days, but I do take it as an opportunity to really think about what I might have missed or what I might have been putting off, and if I'm ready to do that yet. And I can say that there are people where every year I think, Am I ready to apologize? And every year I'm like, No, not ready yet. But there have also been people that I've apologized to years after the incident, and it is really something that has improved my relationships with so many people in my life, and I'm always really grateful for it.
Blogger Sia, at Every Book a Doorway, says, Here's her quote. She says, "I'm particularly interested in that bit at the end of the blurb, which says, is a world that seems hell bent on rejecting him even worth saving at all?" Sia says, "I'm presuming the answer will be yes, but I very much want to know how Lukoff will justify that yes in a way that rings true and convincing for young trans readers; no pressure or anything," she says. So what is your answer to that question? Why is a cruel world worth saving?
I think that the title is more of a question than a statement. But also, you know, by the end of it, he does want to, and he does end up, you know, saving his very small corner of the world, which should not be mistaken for the world itself, because that is far too big of a job for any one person. But I think that fundamentally, the world has to be worth saving. Because if it's not, what are you going to do? What are you going to spend your days doing? Are you just going to sit on your couch and wait for everything to fall down around your ears? I don't think that that's even possible for human beings. I think that no matter how outsized the odds and no matter how hard it is, the alternative to not trying to fix the big problems that we've gotten ourselves into is almost impossible to maintain on a grand scale. I don't think that you can count on vast numbers of human beings just sitting back and waiting for everything to fall down around them. I think we frankly, want to survive more than that, or at least I hope so.
It's an interesting answer. In A World Worth Saving, you've created a diverse cast of characters in terms of their gender and sexual identities. So can you talk about that diversity?
I guess I just wanted to throw a whole bunch of different kinds of queer and trans people together and see what happened. I mean, on the one hand, I will say it didn't feel like I was trying to create a diverse cast. I was just writing all the different kinds of queer and trans people that I know. But I also intentionally made A's friend like sidekick type character, a trans girl, and I specifically made her the kind of grumpy, vaguely misandrist trans lesbian that I know so many of in my real life. I know and I care about so many women who fit that description, and I really wanted to bring a girl like that to life and then also see what would happen if I tried to force her into the role of sidekick to some boy, and then have the character rebel against that as I was trying to write her.
Can you suggest any companion books for A World Worth Saving? Could be other Jewish books, queer books, books that are both...
Ooh, yeah. So I read Sasha Lamb's book When the Angels Left the Old Country somewhere in the drafting of this. And I actually remember feeling really thrilled to read it, because I thought to myself, here is someone who's doing what I'm trying to do, and doing it so much better than me. And I love to read a book that is so much better than anything I think that I could do myself. I just found the prose in it to be so stunning and so unique and so original, and it also felt like deeply meaningful and significant for me to read something that felt kind of like old timey, like Yiddish literature that I can't read because I don't speak Yiddish made queer and trans and feminist, and that book was such a gift.
Yeah, I totally agree about When the Angels Left the Old Country. I actually interviewed Sasha Lamb when the book was new, and I'll put a link in the show notes back to that interview too.
Cool. Sasha also was the person at the launch party for A World Worth Saving in Boston. So Rick Riordan introduced us, and then Sasha interviewed me about it. And that was so exciting, that really felt like a huge honor.
Yeah, that's wonderful. It's Tikkun Olam time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?
I want listeners to buy books from their local bookstore, if they have one, and Barnes and Noble or bookshop.org if they don't or to get books from the library. Actually, no, I would say, get books in the library first, and then if you want to buy one, you should get it from a local bookstore, or at least something other than Amazon.
Good. Yes, I agree.
People always ask me, where can they buy a book that I will get the most money from it, and I don't know, from that. But I always tell them that I am most able to thrive in a world where independent bookstores are successful, and so if they want to support me and my career, they should be supporting local independent bookstores.
That's a great answer. Is there an interview question you never get asked that you would like to answer?
Ooh, is there... you didn't put this in your email! I didn't know this one was coming! For this book. I really like it when people ask me about dumpster diving, because there's a whole dumpster diving subplot in this and I can tell you that every single food item that the characters find in the trash is something that I also found when I was dumpster diving in Brooklyn in my 20s, and that you shouldn't go digging through the trash by yourself right now, but that it is also a skill that one can learn if one wants to find people who can teach them.
That's intriguing. What are you working on next?
Ooh, well, there's four different books right now that are in four different stages of drafting revisions, one of which is a secret, one of which I am still not quite able to talk about, but I can say that I am working on the chapter book that I wrote for that multi author series spearheaded by Kate Messner, called The Kids In Mrs. Z's Class. My book in that series is about a little boy named Sebastian, and he is closer to me, I think, than maybe any character I've ever written. I love him very much.
Do you have any more Jewish content books in the works?
There is the possibility that I could write a sequel to A World Worth Saving, but that kind of depends on how this one is received, so I'm open to that, but we don't know if it's going to happen yet. I haven't figured out yet how I want to put Jewishness into future projects, because this was very hard. It's going to take me a minute to be up for it again.
It would be wonderful to get a sequel, because this was a great adventure, and I think it would be really fun to have it continue.
Oh, thank you so much. I hope so.
Where can listeners learn more about your work?
My website, kylelukoff.com, and you can follow me on Bluesky and also Instagram, both at just kylelukoff.
Is there anything else that you want to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?
I think I would really like to plug my board book Awake, Asleep. I'm incredibly proud of that one. It is my first rhyming book. I love board books, and I love rhyming books, but there's so many that don't quite live up to my standards. Yeah, I think I would say I would love for Awake, Asleep to get a little bit more recognition, because I think that that book, more than anything else, proves my range and proves my investment in quality literature for all kinds of children of all ages, not just the more specific pigeonhole that I could very easily be slotted into.
Well, then can you tell us a little bit more about Awake, Asleep?
Yeah. I mean, it's for babies. It's about everything that could happen in a baby's day, from waking up to falling asleep. And it is written in a very tight rhyme scheme that I think I made up by myself. It's 126 words, and half of those words are the word "a." It is perfect if there's a baby in your life.
Wonderful. We always need more quality board books. Absolutely. Kyle Lukoff, thank you so much for speaking with me and Shana Tova.
Thank you so much, and Shana Tova to you.
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] This is Ruth Spiro. I'm the author of One Small Spark: A Tikkun Olam Story, and I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to the illustrator of this beautiful book, Victoria Tentler Krylov. Without her absolutely luminous illustrations, this book would not be as wonderful as it is, I so appreciate her work and her dedication to her art that I think it's important to dedicate this to her.
Hi. My name is Richard Michaelson. I will be joining Heidi Rabinowitz soon on The Book of Life, my favorite podcast. I will be talking about my book More Than Enough, inspired by Maimonides' golden ladder of giving. And I would like to dedicate this episode to my wife, who teaches me every day the meaning of generosity, and to the Northampton street people, Downtown Dan and Busker Steve, who, as little as they have, know it is more than enough, and they always have a little bit to pass on. [END DEDICATION]
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack to join me in growing Jewish joy and shrinking antisemitic hate. Get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news, and occasional calls to action right in your inbox. Sign up for the newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. You can also find The Book of Life on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon or making a one time donation to our home library, the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Learn more about AJL at JewishLibraries.org. Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading. [END OUTRO]
[MUSIC, PROMO] Step into the world of mystery, memory and meaning with author Saul Golubcow. In this compelling interview, Golubcow discusses his gripping works, The Cost of Living and Who Killed the Rabbi’s Wife? This collection of three novellas and a novel feature Frank Wolf, a Holocaust survivor turned private investigator. Once a philosophy professor, Frank now solves crimes within the Orthodox Jewish communities of 1970s New York City. He is joined by his inquisitive grandson, Joel, and later his sharp daughter in law, Aliya. Frank navigates a complex world where Jewish tradition, trauma and truth collide. Golubcow shares the inspiration behind his characters, the cultural richness of his settings and how Jewish tradition shapes every clue. Don't miss this conversation with a writer who brings heart and humanity to the detective genre. Find us at JewishLibraries.org/NiceJewishBooks. [END MUSIC]
