The Matchmaker's Gift(95)

After reading about “Love on the Lower East Side” on the Museum at Eldridge Street’s website, I decided to anchor my fictitious matchmaker in that same neighborhood during the 1910s and 1920s. Although the pandemic made it impossible to travel to the Lower East Side streets I wanted to write about, I was aided in my research by the online collections of the Tenement Museum, the Center for Jewish History, the New York Public Library, and, of course, the Museum at Eldridge Street. It was from these sources, as well as others, that I learned about the wedding of “The Pickle Millionaire,” the real knish war of 1916, and the formation of matchmaker unions. In my novel, I reimagined these events and altered them in order to best suit my story.

Before I began my research in earnest, I assumed that the typical matchmaker at the time was an older and somewhat meddlesome woman. In my mind, she was Yenta from Fiddler on the Roof or Dolly Levi from Thornton Wilder’s play. I assumed that there were just a handful of such women, but my assumptions couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only were there thousands of Jewish matchmakers in New York, but the majority of them were men. According to a 1910 New York Times article, there were, by “a conservative estimate, about 5,000 professional schatchens in the city.… The traditional picture is the man of the tenements with a three-pound watch chain and a polka-dotted vest, whose work in life is to see his neighbors happily married.”

In order to explore the portrayal of matchmakers in early 1900s New York, I turned to the Gimpel Beynish cartoons, a popular comic strip by Samuel Zagat, which ran in at least two daily Yiddish newspapers (including The Warheit and The Forward) beginning in 1912. Gimpel was a matchmaker who constantly found himself in problematic and amusing situations. I drew inspiration from fiction as well, including Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Tashrak’s novel Shulem the Shadchen, and Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto.

While I rethought my vision of the typical early-1900s matchmaker, I realized that my character would be facing challenges I had not previously considered. She would be a young, unmarried woman in a business dominated by established, older men. As the character of Sara Glikman took shape, I began to understand that her struggles were no different from those working women still face today.

Of course, I also researched modern-day matchmakers. I spoke with Aleeza Bracha Ben Shalom, also known as “The Marriage Minded Mentor,” to understand what drew her to matchmaking as a calling. From Aleeza, I learned that a matchmaker must be married in order to satisfy religious modesty rules. Aleeza taught me about segulas—lucky charms and customs thought to encourage positive outcomes such as a successful marriage. Dr. Laura Shaw Frank, a law school classmate, reached out to offer me the opportunity to read her recent dissertation on “Jewish Marriage and Divorce in America from 1830–1924.” My law school roommate, Michele Pahmer, helped me to understand the various religious customs surrounding traditional rabbinical courts.

In my quest for accuracy in portraying a rabbinical court scene, I reached out to Rabbi Shlomo Weissmann, the director of Beth Din of America. Through Rabbi Weissmann’s contacts, I was eventually directed to Dr. Zev Eleff, president of Gratz College in Philadelphia. Dr. Eleff was generous with both his time and his knowledge and explained the unstructured nature of a beth din (beis din) at that time in America. Although I found no specific precedent for the court scene in my story, it seems very likely that a woman such as Sara—a woman whose gift compelled her to defy long-held customs and traditions—would have attracted the ire of the many men with whom she competed for work and payment.

Dr. Eleff also shared with me an article from The Jewish Observer by Chaim Shapiro about shadchanim, which helped me to develop a clearer picture of what the world of the early-1900s matchmaker may have been like, the kinds of concerns they would have had, and the methods they might have used. The article drove home the esteem with which a shadchan was held in his community, as well as the idea that a shadchan was considered an “agent of heaven,” fulfilling a divine mission.

For assistance in understanding the experience of immigrants on the Lower East Side in the 1910s and 1920s, I read a variety of memoirs, including: Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, by Rose Cohen; Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side, by Bella Spewack; The House on Henry Street, by Lillian Wald; and The Button Thief of East 14th Street: Scenes from a Life on the Lower East Side 1927–1957, by Fay Webern. I also consulted the following works of nonfiction: World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made, by Irving Howe; America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today, by Pamela S. Nadell; and The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950, by Jenna Weissman Joselit.

Although writing a dual-timeline novel can mean twice as much research, Abby’s story was made easier by the fact that in 1994, I, too, was a young lawyer living and working in New York. As a trusts and estates lawyer, I worked on a few prenuptial agreements, but in order to better understand the intricacies of divorce law, I turned to my former colleague Laurie Ruckel, matrimonial attorney Sherry Weindorf, and family friend Mark Koestler. All of them were kind enough to share their knowledge. In addition, my optometrist, Dr. Alec Perlson, was generous enough to brainstorm with me in order to come up with an ailment for my character Evelyn Morgan in the story.