“Once upon a time,” as the ubiquitous fairy tale states, a young girl begins a search for her prince, or in Sarah Lavane’s case, her beshert, her intended. A lovely story then unfolds, with the young lass encountering obstacles on her journey to love and marriage…and then “they lived happily ever after.”
Fairy tales overcome obstacles and end well; real life can present obstacles upon obstacles with nary a prince or princess in sight.
“Unmatched” is superb in that it illustrates the quandary of the single women that most of us simply do not understand. Lavane shares her struggles and bares her soul of her frustrations and challenges, and it is a heartbreaking read. Some of the dating stories are funny and par for the course. Others are devastatingly brutal.
There are countless stories of people who leave Orthodoxy and then write indictments of the communities they have left behind. This book is nothing like that. Lavane does not play the blame game or launch irrational rants. She shares her struggles and challenges in an honest and often humorous manner. I have never read anything like this before.
Unmatched in the world of Orthodox Jewish literature... in a conversational style that is refreshing... Lavane is impeccably honest about her pain, her mistakes and her resolutions to work on herself...
– The Jewish Press, Rosally Saltsman
Like Eliezer, she should run. But like Eliezer, she stays firmly put. And that’s what I was moved most by from this book. She never ran. She never let go. Sure, she slipped. She did things that were beneath her standards. She flirted with ideas that would take her well out of our faith. But ultimately, she held on.
- Due to editorial decisions, autobiographies from the big Orthodox publishing houses tend to be antiseptic. Those from non-Orthodox publishers can be histrionic and overly condemning. In “Unmatched: An Orthodox Jewish woman’s mystifying journey to find marriage and meaning” (Sifria Publishing. 2022. English. Paperback. 226 pages. ISBN-13: 979-8218010324), Sarah Lavane manages to stay on the tightrope of writing a raw and honest work that inspires, as opposed to an angry condemnation that angers. This is a rare memoir that took much courage to write, and was done honestly and maturely.
What has most of the feedback to your book been like so far?
Jaw-dropping. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive to a degree I never envisioned. One of my single pre-readers told me she burst into tears when she finished it. I had worked hard on keeping the tone upbeat, so I asked her why. She told me that for the first time she felt that somebody “gets” it.
Others have told me it made them laugh and cry and everything in between. Married people thanked me for giving them insight into the singles world, and some admitted they had never fully understood it. Another single woman messaged me to say that maybe now she can forgive herself. She had always blamed herself for how her life turned out. These reactions have blown me away.
Just last night a woman I know called me. She got married in her 50s, after being single longer than she had been married. She started sobbing right on the call and said that I articulated what she couldn’t articulate all those years. I’m really stunned. This woman is married almost a decade and she still felt so strongly, how it validated her single years.
I often thought of trashing the entire manuscript. I didn’t think it was that good, and I was definitely afraid of putting so many personal struggles out there for public consumption. But now I am so glad I didn’t abandon the project. My hope for this book was that it would serve a purpose, and I’m grateful to see it has already begun to do just that.
