Lynda Cohen Loigman believes in soulmates. “I do not assume everyone has just one. I feel there are some individuals on this world that you just simply actually join with,” she tells POPSUGAR. “It would not even should be romantic. For those who’re fortunate in life, you might have a pair completely different soulmates, whether or not they be romantic ones or platonic ones.”

In her novel “The Matchmaker’s Present,” printed on Sept. 20, one among primary character Abby’s platonic soulmates is her grandmother, Sara Glikman, who dies in the beginning of the ebook, leaving her with a group of journals and a whole lot of unanswered questions. The pair share a deep bond — and an uncanny capability to determine strangers who’re good 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 america. To Sara, matches are identifiable by skinny golden traces that join one soulmate to the opposite.

Her granddaughter, Abby, inherits this present — although Abby, a jaded divorce lawyer with out a lot religion in eternal romance, tries to struggle towards it. However over the course of the story, Abby learns quite a bit about how laborious her grandmother needed to struggle towards individuals who could not stand to see a younger girl making matches based mostly on one thing as intangible as pure religion and intuition.

Loigman was impressed to jot down “The Matchmaker’s Present” within the depths of a COVID-19 quarantine binge-watch. Her daughter and her daughter’s roommate got here residence to quarantine together with her, and like many people, they devoured Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking” collectively. After watching the present, Loigman’s daughter’s pal confirmed her a New York Occasions 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 ebook she was engaged on in the meanwhile, selecting as a substitute to dive into the world of matchmaking. “I really feel like everyone in that second simply needed to learn a cheerful story, a narrative that was joyful,” Loigman says. “We have been at such a disconnected time, we have been all so remoted, and a narrative a few matchmaker is simply by definition a narrative about connections, as a result of that is what they do. They make connections.”

Matchmaking is a long-standing a part of Jewish custom. Based on the Torah, the very first matchmaker — or to make use of the Yiddish phrase, shadkhan — was God himself, who matched Adam and Eve. In lots of Orthodox Jewish communities, matchmakers nonetheless play a important position; as a result of custom forbids women and men from interacting, the shadkhan could also be totally accountable for pairing up group members. Historically, 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, needed to base her story in a particular time and place, so she selected the 1910s and Nineteen Twenties, specializing in early Jewish immigrant communities in New York Metropolis’s Decrease East Aspect. A selected line from a New York Occasions article solidified her imaginative and prescient for the story. “The article had this line that was, ‘At this marriage ceremony, the scent of roses and orange blossoms mingled with the odors of dried herring and pickles,'” she says. “I despatched it to my editor and I simply mentioned, ‘That is what I would like my ebook to be. I would like it to be roses and pickles. I would like it to have the uplifting, joyful, romantic elements, however I would like it to have the grit. I would like all that Decrease East Aspect historical past and grit to be represented too.'”

Her analysis additionally led her to some surprises. “In 1910 in New York Metropolis, there have been over 5,000 skilled matchmakers,” she says. In fact, “the majority of them have been males. They weren’t all males by any means, nevertheless it was a enterprise. There was some huge cash concerned.” She selected to middle her ebook round Sara, a younger girl who has a number of strikes towards her as she pursues her calling as a matchmaker, and never solely due to her gender. “For those who have been an single girl, you were not speculated to be alone with an single man looking for a match for him,” Loigman says. Single and younger, Sara finds herself going through authorized threats from males who see her as a risk to their livelihoods.

Nonetheless, Sara pushes by means of — and so does her granddaughter, Abby, who faces extra fashionable pressures that inform her she ought to worth cause and logic over love and emotion.

Loigman’s analysis additionally led her to interview some up to date Orthodox matchmakers, who’re nonetheless very a lot energetic immediately. “Did they consider it as a calling? Did they really feel that compulsion to do it?” she says. “I feel typically, sure. I feel individuals do really feel like they’ve a aptitude for it.” In the present day, she says, “I do assume that the position of the matchmaker has modified from what it was once. I feel it is change into extra of a life-coach position lately, the place individuals need to discuss to younger singles about being extra open to completely different sorts of individuals. It is not as transactional because it was.” As matchmaking is alive and properly in lots of fashionable Jewish communities, Netflix is taking notice. In March, it introduced it was producing a collection referred to as “Jewish Matchmaking.” “Will utilizing the standard apply of shidduch assist them discover their soulmate in immediately’s world?” the present’s tagline reads. The phrase shidduch refers to a match or marriage companion, nevertheless it additionally means “to relaxation” or “to expertise tranquility,” in accordance with the Jerusalem Publish.

Certainly, for Loigman, “The Matchmaker’s Present” was meant to supply some tranquility and connection for readers in a time of want. She additionally needed it to current a hotter sort of Jewish story at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise. “I really feel a duty to inform Jewish tales,” she says. “Once I wrote my first ebook, I simply informed a narrative, and it occurred to be a Jewish story, as a result of that was the story that I knew to inform. Afterwards, the response that I bought was such that it made me really feel prefer it was vital to inform Jewish tales that aren’t Holocaust tales, and aren’t battle tales, and aren’t tales about us getting murdered and being trapped and all of these items.”

In the end, Loigman hopes her work fosters connections throughout all boundaries, simply as Sara and Abby do within the ebook. “The factor that makes me happiest is when individuals write to me and say, ‘This jogged my memory of my grandmother. This introduced me a lot happiness.’ They usually’re not Jewish individuals, they usually’re studying it, they usually’re connecting with it,” she says. “We’d like that connection between individuals.”