Lynda Cohen Loigman believes in soulmates. “I don’t think everybody has only one. I think there are some people in this world that you just really connect with,” she tells POPSUGAR. “It doesn’t even have to be romantic. If you’re lucky in life, you have a couple different soulmates, whether they be romantic ones or platonic ones.”
In her novel “The Matchmaker’s Gift,” printed on Sept. 20, considered one of primary character Abby’s platonic soulmates is her grandmother, Sara Glikman, who dies in the beginning of the guide, leaving her with a set of journals and numerous unanswered questions. The pair share a deep bond — and an uncanny capacity to establish strangers who’re excellent for one another.
Sara, the opposite central character in Loigman’s candy marvel of an intergenerational story, makes her first match on the age of 12, introducing her sister to her future husband whereas they’re on a ship immigrating to the United States. To Sara, matches are identifiable by skinny golden traces that join one soulmate to the opposite.
Her granddaughter, Abby, inherits this reward — although Abby, a jaded divorce lawyer with out a lot religion in eternal romance, tries to struggle in opposition to it. But over the course of the story, Abby learns lots about how onerous her grandmother needed to struggle in opposition to individuals who could not stand to see a younger lady making matches based mostly on one thing as intangible as pure religion and intuition.
Loigman was impressed to write down “The Matchmaker’s Gift” within the depths of a COVID-19 quarantine binge-watch. Her daughter and her daughter’s roommate got here dwelling to quarantine along with her, and like many people, they devoured Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking” collectively. After watching the present, Loigman’s daughter’s buddy confirmed her a New York Times article about her grandmother, who had been an Orthodox matchmaker in Brooklyn within the Nineteen Seventies.
The spark caught instantly. Loigman determined to drop the guide she was engaged on for the time being, selecting as a substitute to dive into the world of matchmaking. “I feel like everybody in that moment just wanted to read a happy story, a story that was joyful,” Loigman says. “We were at such a disconnected time, we were all so isolated, and a story about a matchmaker is just by definition a story about connections, because that’s what they do. They make connections.”
Matchmaking is a long-standing a part of Jewish custom. According to the Torah, the very first matchmaker — or to make use of the Yiddish phrase, shadkhan — was God himself, who matched Adam and Eve. In many Orthodox Jewish communities, matchmakers nonetheless play a crucial function; as a result of custom forbids women and men from interacting, the shadkhan could also be fully answerable for pairing up neighborhood members. Traditionally, matches have been made largely for financial causes, however over time, that started to shift as communities started permitting women and men to have interaction in courtship.
Loigman, a author of historic fiction, wished to base her story in a particular time and place, so she selected the 1910s and Twenties, specializing in early Jewish immigrant communities in New York City’s Lower East Side. A selected line from a New York Times article solidified her imaginative and prescient for the story. “The article had this line that was, ‘At this wedding, the scent of roses and orange blossoms mingled with the odors of dried herring and pickles,'” she says. “I sent it to my editor and I just said, ‘This is what I want my book to be. I want it to be roses and pickles. I want it to have the uplifting, joyful, romantic parts, but I want it to have the grit. I want all that Lower East Side history and grit to be represented too.'”
Her analysis additionally led her to some surprises. “In 1910 in New York City, there were over 5,000 professional matchmakers,” she says. Of course, “the bulk of them were men. They weren’t all men by any means, but it was a business. There was a lot of money involved.” She selected to heart her guide round Sara, a younger lady who has a number of strikes in opposition to her as she pursues her calling as a matchmaker, and never solely due to her gender. “If you were an unmarried woman, you weren’t supposed to be alone with an unmarried man trying to find a match for him,” Loigman says. Single and younger, Sara finds herself dealing with authorized threats from males who see her as a risk to their livelihoods.
Still, Sara pushes by means of — and so does her granddaughter, Abby, who faces extra fashionable pressures that inform her she ought to worth purpose and logic over love and emotion.
Loigman’s analysis additionally led her to interview some modern Orthodox matchmakers, who’re nonetheless very a lot lively immediately. “Did they think of it as a calling? Did they feel that compulsion to do it?” she says. “I think generally, yes. I think people do feel like they have a flair for it.” Today, she says, “I do think that the role of the matchmaker has changed from what it used to be. I think it’s become more of a life-coach role these days, where people want to talk to young singles about being more open to different kinds of people. It’s not as transactional as it was.” As matchmaking is alive and properly in lots of fashionable Jewish communities, Netflix is taking be aware. In March, it introduced it was producing a collection known as “Jewish Matchmaking.” “Will using the traditional practice of shidduch help them find their soulmate in today’s world?” the present’s tagline reads. The phrase shidduch refers to a match or marriage associate, but it surely additionally means “to rest” or “to experience tranquility,” based on the Jerusalem Post.
Indeed, for Loigman, “The Matchmaker’s Gift” was meant to supply some tranquility and connection for readers in a time of want. She additionally wished it to current a hotter type of Jewish story at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise. “I feel a responsibility to tell Jewish stories,” she says. “When I wrote my first book, I just told a story, and it happened to be a Jewish story, because that was the story that I knew to tell. Afterwards, the response that I got was such that it made me feel like it was important to tell Jewish stories that are not Holocaust stories, and are not war stories, and are not stories about us getting murdered and being trapped and all of these things.”
Ultimately, Loigman hopes her work fosters connections throughout all boundaries, simply as Sara and Abby do within the guide. “The thing that makes me happiest is when people write to me and say, ‘This reminded me of my grandmother. This brought me so much happiness.’ And they’re not Jewish people, and they’re reading it, and they’re connecting with it,” she says. “We need that connection between people.”
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