Yossi’s suicide attempt over marrying Kayla and his family’s role in arranging their marriage

Yossi’s overdose turns a forbidden courtship into a family crisis and exposes the social rules standing between him and Kayla. His attempted suicide is followed not by a simple reconciliation but by a chain of negotiations: his family must decide whether to protect its reputation or help him marry the woman he loves, while Kayla must overcome fear deliberately instilled by her father. Devorah’s intervention, the brothers’ organizing, and Kayla’s eventual resolve help make the match possible, though the engagement and wedding are kept hurried and discreet to contain gossip.

Courtship and Social Stakes

Yossi has been involved for three years with a Sephardic girl from Williamsburg, but the relationship becomes public knowledge when Kayla’s father discovers it and prevents her from leaving the house. At the Shabbos table, the affair is the subject everyone discusses. The conflict is not presented as a private disagreement between two young people alone: in the Satmar Hasidic community, Sephardic Jews are treated as lower-class, and Ashkenazi Jews are not expected to marry outside their social class. A marriage between Yossi and Kayla would therefore be understood as a scandal affecting his whole family.

Yossi’s reputation already marks him as a family rebel. He smokes Marlboros, talks back to his father, shaves his beard close, and conceals his payos behind his ears. His behavior horrifies his relatives, but the book places the relationship and his rebellion together as part of the family’s anxiety about him. He has been drinking heavily because he is depressed about Kayla and faces pressure to marry while wanting to be with her. The courtship has lasted long enough that the prospect of losing it is not an abstract threat; it is the immediate crisis around which the family’s choices gather.

The Overdose and Its Immediate Aftermath

During a Shabbos visit to his parents, Yossi drinks so much cognac that he collapses before the morning meal begins and before his father can pronounce the blessing over the wine. His father asks coolly whether he is breathing. Cheskel checks him, then says that Yossi must be taken to the hospital. The contrast between the religious meal about to begin and the emergency on the floor makes the crisis especially stark: the family’s observance continues to shape what it can do even as Yossi’s condition demands urgent attention.

A Hatzolah ambulance takes him away. Because the family observes a no-phones rule on Shabbos, those left at home have to wait until it ends to learn what happened. When Cheskel calls, he reports that Yossi’s stomach was pumped at Cornwall Hospital and that he is doing all right. Devorah and Eli drive to collect him. Yossi comes through the double doors pale and sullen, his body hunched as though standing straight hurts, and refuses to speak.

His silence gives way to a longer withdrawal. Yossi stays in bed for a week and will not get up. His mother asks Eli to visit and persuade him to recover from the relationship. Eli returns bewildered: Yossi will not leave his bed unless he can marry Kayla. The family can no longer treat the overdose as an isolated excess. In the narrative, it is bound to his despair over a marriage he believes he cannot have, and his refusal to get up keeps that conflict in view after the immediate medical danger has passed.

Family Negotiations and Kayla’s Fear

Devorah presses Eli to tell his mother to let Yossi marry Kayla rather than risk losing him. Eli explains that the family fears the consequences of gossip: if Yossi marries a Sephardic girl, people may decide that something is wrong with him, and the stigma could spread to his relatives. His answer makes the family’s calculation plain. The obstacle is not only Kayla’s father or the couple’s different backgrounds; it is the fear that the match will alter how the community sees the whole family.

Eli eventually agrees to speak with his mother. She gives a qualified consent: if Kayla’s family accepts the match, she will not stand in the way. Eli then meets with his brothers around Devorah and Eli’s dining-room table, and they agree to find someone who can speak with Kayla’s father. Devorah thinks the dispute may be over, but after Shabbos she hears that Yossi is back in bed and will not speak to anyone. His family’s initial concession has not resolved the crisis, because Kayla herself has been frightened away.

When Devorah and Eli visit, they find out why. Kayla’s father has taken her to a Kabbalist, who warned that terrible things—including warts and diseases—would happen if she married Yossi. Yossi’s friend discovers that Kayla’s father paid the Kabbalist to make the prediction. Even with that deception exposed, Kayla is too frightened to speak to Yossi. The episode adds a second form of pressure to the class barrier: a religious authority’s prediction has been used to make the forbidden match seem dangerous in the future as well as scandalous in the present.

Devorah’s Intervention and the Match

Devorah sits beside Yossi’s bed, pulling her shirt down over her pregnant stomach, and urges him to trust the three-year relationship rather than assume that Kayla’s moment of fear has erased it. She tells him that if Kayla cares for him as much as he believes, she may get past what the Kabbalist said. Yossi props himself up on one elbow, his strawberry-blond hair mussed beneath his black velvet yarmulke, and asks whether Devorah really thinks so. Her reassurance is a personal act of intervention: unlike the family members focused on reputation and permission, she addresses Yossi’s immediate fear that Kayla will not return.

Three days later, Kayla calls and promises to fight her father. Eli’s brothers arrange for people to put pressure on him, and he agrees to allow the match. The outcome depends on more than any one person’s consent: Kayla’s decision gives the relationship a voice, the brothers mobilize support, and her father ultimately yields. Yossi’s family has moved from treating the proposed marriage as a threat to its standing to helping make it possible.

The engagement is arranged quickly and kept hush-hush, with the wedding date set for six weeks later to avoid too much scandal. Rumors that Kayla is already pregnant circulate, but Devorah dismisses them as idle gossip rather than confirmed fact. She and Eli stay at Shprintza’s house in Kiryas Joel for the weekend of the wedding. Devorah dislikes staying there because Shprintza is sweet to her when Eli is present but behaves differently as soon as he leaves for shul. That observation leaves the event’s resolution deliberately qualified: Yossi and Kayla’s marriage goes ahead, but the surrounding world remains organized by reputation, performance, and the careful management of what others will say.