I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl, thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish books. It is always a pleasure to meet new authors and welcome them to the podcast. But today is extra special, since I am welcoming back the very first author I ever interviewed. When I first approached Talia Carner, nearly three years ago, I had no experience, no sample episodes, no nothing. But she graciously agreed to speak with me about her previous book, The Third Daughter. And I am so grateful to her for taking a chance on me. Talia, I'm so excited to be speaking with you again, this time about the Boy with the Star Tattoo. So welcome. Talia,
Thank you so much for having me here, and I never suspected at the time that you had not no experience, because you were a terrific interviewer. So thank you then for then and for now.
Oh, thank you so would you please tell me about the Boy with the Star Tattoo?
The Boy with a Star Tattoo is a novel that is entirely about Israel yet completely set in France. How is that possible? It combines two very interesting stories, one set in 1946 the youth aliyah, the way in which Israeli agents scoured the countryside, and in this case, I only looked into France in search of Jewish orphans and then brought them to then Palestine, post World War Two. It's not a holocaust book, it's what happened after, and the second event is supposedly nothing to do with it, except that it does 1969 the escape of the boats of Cherbourg, which was an Israeli naval action taking place in the port city of Cherbourg, which is by the English channel. I put those two stories together because the boy with a start tatoo was a child rescued in 46 and now he is an Israeli naval officer in Cherbourg getting ready for this incredible action against that has to do with the French arms embargo. His assistant, who is obsessed with his past, decides to find out what happened, and she follows a track of breadcrumbs through France to find what happened in those years, where had be he come from, and what happened to his family, and that is the story that brings us, I must say, Zionism in its pure format.
Let's start with the Cherbourg portion of it. So Israel had commissioned France to build some ships for them and paid them what I'm assuming was 10s of millions of dollars. And then France said, well, we don't want to deliver the ships. So can you talk about the context there? How could they say that?
Yes, I will. I will quickly explain that you all know the map of Israel with its very long shoreline, and until the ... early 1960s the strategy of protecting the shoreline was from the air. Israel's Navy was almost non existent. The Navy commissioned a private shipyard in North Normandy, and it was approved by the French government, but the contract was private, as all boats are being built privately, but again, approved by the French government for 12 ships that were going to be a completely new type of naval warfare by 1967, the Six Day War five had been delivered out of the 12. And a few months later, De Gaulle announced an arms embargo on Israel, which was disastrous because all of Israel's enemies were being armed by Russia. Israel alone, at that time, was being armed just by France. The US was not in the picture, and all of Israel's airplanes and tanks were now under the embargo. Could not they could not even get spare parts, as they were getting out of commission, while all of the Arab countries after the 1967 war, when they lost, they were licking their wounds and getting ready, ready for another round. Israel needed its those boats, so number six and number seven kind of snuck out, but Pompidou came into power in 1968 and clamped down further on that embargo. So as the rest of the boats were coming out of production, one by one, they were now stuck at the port of Cherbourg, unable to leave, and that created tremendous amount of strategic problem for Israel, because the seven that were now in Israel could not be armed until the rest of them arrived, because supposedly they were for all explore, exploration, not for military use. And as I'm saying, the drums of war were drumming very loud as Israel's enemies were getting ready.
So this operation that our, one of our main protagonists, Sharon, was recruited for, was to help smuggle in Israelis into Cherbourg to man the boats to sneak them out. So she had to find the staff and the sailors, right?
Right. So, so here's an I was one of the big strategic problem is, since Israel had no navy to speak of, and new boats that were new invention. They didn't have the personnel to man five boats until then, every time a boat was finished, a team of 21 men sailed it to Israel. It took about nine days, and then they flew back and worked on the next boat as it was being built and outfitted, and they needed to be tested. People needed to be trained. But now that the five were stuck, the minute that the green light is going to come on and five boats would leave. They need 110 men. So they did. Israeli Navy started in [19]68 to prepare for that moment by sneaking in other kind of personnel, as people who didn't know of even how to to swim, but other engineers and electricians who had to be trained on these particular boats, and this is kind of the job I had to give my protagonist, because she's now a young woman. In a world of men, there were absolutely no jobs for women on these boats or in that environment, but I could give her some of those unassigned positions that I learned through my research that because some of these, many of these guys are still alive, and I couldn't have someone come back and say, Wow, that wasn't my my this was my job. There was no woman doing that, so I did manage with that, but that is, was an incredible preparation, with a lot of thoughts and and anything that could fall through it any moment, if that would be discovered, meaning the train the smuggling of Israelis military guys to come and be trained on boats that were again legally manufactured and legally bought. And they guys arrived legally. It was nothing illegal in their arrival, but the entire operation was becoming one that you did not want the French government to discover. Yes, but I would like to say that most of my book is really not about naval warfare, because I got a tremendous amount of information in the research, but I don't write naval warfare. I write about human drama. I write about moral dilemmas. I write about Jewish identity. I write about what happens to people and their emotions that are invested in the events, the historical events, and that is why I use that operation as part of this particular thinking of what were the moral dilemmas of both the main characters and the secondary characters, because they are quite a few of them, some real life characters who I found to be absolutely fascinating. And of course, dealing with the Jewish identity was the big the big question of the book.
Yeah, absolutely okay. So let's get back to the characters then. So Sharon is being raised by her grandmother. And Sharon's mother had been someone who left France as a young woman or teen, I guess, during that youth Aliyah movement, and she died very young, so Sharon always felt that loss and wanting to know who her mother was, what her story was, to know more about her. And then she meets Daniel, who she learns had been taken out as a as a young child, who's about four when he was taken from France, placed in a loving home, and he has no interest in finding out who his birth parents were, what their story was, how he got there. He was very, felt very complete in the family that raised him. So can you kind of talk about those two different points of view?
Yes, and this is something that I myself, just to tell you the listeners, I'm Seventh Generation Sabra, meaning Israeli born my family, even though I'm Ashkenazi, we have not suffered directly from the Holocaust, because they were already in the Holy Land for a few 100, a couple of 100 years.
Amazing,
Yeah, but all my friends were children of Holocaust survivors, my friends in my Tel Aviv neighborhood. So I was very much touched by the stories that I've heard over the years, the families I knew, their homes I know. So I wanted to explain that within that I came across two opposing point of views, those who wanted to know everything, but could find nothing, and those who could find did not want to know because so I will focus on Sharon, whose mother arrived as at 17, married Sharon's father, who was a Sabra and Israeli. Born at 18, they bought they had Sharon at 19, and both of them got killed in the War of Independence six weeks after Sharon was born, which is why she was raised by her grandparents. And I must say that Sharon is actually has this background in the Epilog of my novel Jerusalem Maiden, I didn't this is not a new part of the background. It became very, very convenient for me when Sharon came back as a protagonist of this story to to take me into the rescuing of Jewish children after the Holocaust, because she wants to know she has no information, and there's no way her mother's name was Judith Katz. You can't get any information about a someone with this name. The other side was Danny, who is now very patriotic, completely focuses on Israel Defense and preparing for the war, and he has no time, emotions, and patience to find out. He says all the stories are the same. They are gathering, the deportations into concentration camps, and the incinerators. He has to focus on Israel's future. He's not spending his emotions struggling with what had been. He has this focus, and that is the other side of what I've encountered in my life with those two different situations. But Sharon, because he had arrived from friends, and at first, she doesn't know when she first meets him and starts to follow him and take taking the job. She doesn't realize he had been as young as that. She thinks that he would reflect for her some of the experience of her mother from youth Aliyah, from France. But she finds out that this is not to be until she one day at on the beach, discovers the start tattoo at the bottom of his foot, and then she starts all over again. She says, somebody must know something about this. He does not cooperate with her questions. He gets very annoyed, actually. And she against his will, she is now starting to investigate. And that's how the the thread goes through the the book that takes us to the Loire Valley. And I must say that it had to be specifically go to Chateau de Valençay, which was a specific Chateau that had a history related to the fact that the Duke had been the Duke of Sagan was a German title. So therefore, when the Nazis arrived to that chateau. They could not actually arrest the Duchess, because she was a German citizen, a German Duchess. So I had to stay with this particular Chateau rather than another one. I'm not going to go into the whole story in the history, but just to say that a chateau is more sexy than farmhouse, [Sheryl laughs] I wanted the story around that, but by the time I was doing research into the Loire Valley, COVID had hit. You were interviewing me about the Third Daughter, but I was then researching the Loire valley with drones in order to I figured out with with the tour guides and local historians, which were specific villages around the Chateau that I needed to study and put my story, and then, as I'm saying, I used drones to learn those particular layout of those villages. So as I'm saying, this is a lot more than about boats. It's about the landscape of France, the history, the mood. What was the kind of mood that made people, let's say, when an agent, a youth aliyah agent knocks on the door of a villa of a farmhouse and say he says, Do you by any chance have a Jewish kid that you've been hiding for last few years, let me take her across the Mediterranean to a country whose language she doesn't speak, and the people who just raised her for 3, 4, or 5, years say to the stranger at the door, sure, take her. It makes absolutely no sense, but we know that this is what happened. And I said that to understand how did it happen, what were they saying to these people, to make them give away the children, and I don't want to create the impression that all children that were hidden were loved and cared for. There was tremendous amount of abuse, as well as someone who's written several books about what happens to children when they are not well protected, I know that part of the story and the and the terrible things that happened, but the overall arching idea was, what was the mentality in France at the time, because I only said this in France, not all over Europe, that made that possible for people to say, Yes, I'm giving this child to you. And the answer is, it has to do with those who believed that the children belonged with their people, and therefore they gave them back to their people, and that too is the elegant answer. The less elegant answer is money, because Henrietta Szold the same fantastic, fierce woman who had founded Hadassah in 1911 now 30, somewhat years later, is the President of youth aliyah. And she was a fantastic fundraiser. So those agents were flush with money, and they would offer the people who've hidden the children. They would offer them compensation for the many, many months and years that they have taken care of the children. The idea was that when the parents first left the children, and this is true everywhere in Europe. They parents who gave the kids away to business associates, to housekeepers to monasteries, thought it was going to be for two, three months, four months, the war was going to be over. No one had imagined the consequences and what history wrote in our books. So the people who ended up being somewhat stuck with children that they had never planned to raise were may have had those children now, for a few years, some didn't even remember the kids arrived. I have a case in my book about these old women. They don't they are, by now, losing it. They don't even remember why, how the two, the brother and sister, arrived. But the girl who is matured in the meanwhile, the older sister, is actually taking care of these two old ladies? There were many. They were as many stories as there were hidden kids.
Yeah, I actually interviewed Jennifer Rosner about her book Once We Were Home, which dealt exactly with that.
Yes, she did a great job, and I recommend her book.
Let's go get back to the characters. So the Sharon story is mostly taking place in 1968 but then in 1942 we meet Claudette, who is a young Christian woman who's an amazing seamstress, and who I think was born with a bad leg, she's she's crippled and can barely walk, and so she's been very housebound. And one person that she did occasionally see was the Jewish, uh, merchant, peddler, thank you, who would come by with this cart every so often. And he helped her by giving her a brace so that she could stand and move a little better, and mentioned to her that his son also had a bad leg. And then skip forward a little bit, she ends up at the war has started, and she ends up at this Chateau as the seamstress. And the Chateau was sort of a way station for hiding Jews. Was that in real life, or is this just part of your story?
Um, actually, the story came to me directly from a man who is now around 80. He was born in 42 in the Chateau where the Duchess had hid his mother.
Okay,
the Duchess was her the mother's best friend. His father was not Jewish, so he stayed in Paris, but the mother spent a pregnancy there and gave birth and and they stayed there until the war. The war ended, the father would visit them once in a while, and that is where the story became came to me with a chateau, and actually the Duchess happened to be married or living there as the Duchess for a very short period of time of those war years. So there was very little information about her that the current administrators of the Chateau didn't know. But I put them in touch with this first account, first primary resource of information is this particular man who is French architect living in Long Island New York, who gave me that story and introduction. okay, so
So let's get back to Claudette.
Yeah. Well, so Claudette. But what's interesting, I wanted a Claudette experience, actually, is with the Jewish peddler, is that he taught her to read and write, and Claudette had, uh, her condition would have been something pretty simple in today's uh, today's medicine. She was a breach baby whose hip came out of its socket, probably at birth, and was never fixed. And as a result, additional falls create, create multiple additional damage to to that case, and because children used to walk to school, sometimes five miles, she could not go to school, and she was not educated, but her grandmother took her in order to teach her to sew, because no one would marry her. And that is where the Jewish peddler who was visiting often enough would taught her how to read and brought her books, and then he he gave her the brace. the important part for me was how Claudette experience with Jews was different from the anti semitism around her. For her and her grandmother also said about Jews are close to God. So her grandmother, who raised her, had this positive view, but in a sea of anti semitism, Claudette saw Judaism in a different way, and when she matured later, she even wants to to become Jewish. She doesn't understand what's involved in that. And it took a while, because it's not the same as for Catholics who have some spray a few, you know, dribble some water and say a few words. The Jews are not welcoming to conversion. So, so that was came, brought me to the question of identity. What does it mean to be Jewish? How does one become Jewish? Is not it's not enough to want to be Jewish, or it's not enough to want your child who ... [I'm] not going to give the twist and and spoilers of this book. But what does it mean to be Jewish? And it is examined ... This question is examined from different directions.
I wanted to go back to Sharon, since you mentioned that this is really about personal relationships. And she started out in deep mourning. Her fiance was missing, presumed dead, that the submarine that he was serving on apparently sunk, but they have not found it, and so they had no bodies to bury, and so she has been spending months in mourning with his family, but a little bit in limbo. You know, everyone knows he's dead, but they don't. It's not official. The submarine hasn't been found. So it's after this months of this limbo and grief that she ends up going to France, and she meets Daniel, and so she's definitely not open to or looking for a relationship, but as they work together, you can see that there's something there that starts to develop.
Yes, I don't write romance too much. I don't have sex scenes in my book, in any of my book, I I focus on the emotional part, the connection and as they work together, as you say, they get to appreciate each other. He gives her very difficult tasks because there's no one else to do it, and they are challenging and difficult, and she's young, but he has trust in her, and I must say that I brought it from my own personal experience as an IDF soldier when I was assigned in I mean, the tasks that I look back are enormous, but my entire the entire army, was 18 to 20 year olds that we did that we had to do it. So that kind of a mentality is very Israeli. You you get the task, you figure out and you do it. You don't shy away from it. You don't become the problem by becoming hysterical, by becoming unable to perform, and then you affect the team, so she is growing under those challenges. She's only 20 year old. When she she begins this job, he's about 26, 27 it's not clear to her, but we know, because now we know he's was born in 42 and and she's growing into the job, but she always doesn't think of him as a love interest in the sense that she thinks is undeserving, that he's had a French girlfriend and very sophisticated Sharon doesn't see herself in that league, but he gets to appreciate her even as she becomes really a pest with her questions about his past, that he really demands that she find she stops
And she really oversteps and writes to his father. I mean, what? What gall? What chutzpah!
the adoptive father, right, right? She, she writes to him. She asks him for information. Yes, she, she says, she, you know, she's a Yenta about it. And you know what? Characters who are not perfect are much more interesting, because the flaw in this case is her strength too, that she doesn't leave things alone.
Yep, true. So you told the story in three different timelines. How did you keep track of all the people in the action and how things were going to weave together?
It was, I would say, one of the most difficult tasks within this novel, if put aside the enormous research that took me to France five times. I had cards for each chapter, colored, color-coded cards, and I kept playing with that for about a year and a half, and I would put them on the floor of my office and keep changing and renaming chapters, and every time I moved something around, I would have to go through The entire manuscript to make sure that the reader knows something that happens, but maybe not too early, and maybe synchronize the other events. It was very complicated. I tried to weave it like a challah with the three stories coming together at the end. I did leave the last last part only to Sharon, because the other two stories line timeline ended. We needed to to get into the the last part, which is just her, her story, or her point of view story, I would say,
so you obviously did a ton of research, as you said, and I'm just amazed that you hired drones to to check out the area. That's fantastic.
I must say, I just want to correct I didn't have to hire them. I didn't have to pay for any single drones. The Villages cooperated, the town, the towns of each with the [unclear] City Hall of each of these villages cooperated, and they did the drones for me so it never cost me anything.
That's even more amazing. So, was there anything in your research that really shocked you?
I would say pleasantly shocking to me, was the character of Felix Amiot, the owner of the Cherbourg shipyards. And he is a side character. We get to know him better as the story develops. I must say that he's a real was, real life person who who actually appears in every biography of Coco Chanel, because when Coco Chanel, when the war began and she tried to steal the portion, the half of her business from the Wertheimer brothers, who were her partners, Jewish partners, they fled to the United States, and she was living with a Nazi commander in the Ritz Hotel, and she wanted to Aryan their part, and it was discovered that they had sold it to their best friend, Philip. Amiot was not Jewish, who owned half of the aviation industry of France at the time at the start of the war, however, he cooperated with the Nazis, and he was a collaborator, and therefore he would have been put in front of the death squad had it not been the fact that he gave back the business. He developed the Chanel business for his friends all throughout the war, and handed the business back to them after the war. But his punishment was to be banished from the aviation industry. He owned half of it, [Sheryl "wow"] And so he moved to Cherbourg. This is around 1950 just before 1950 after the war, where his parents had had a house when he was a kid, and he opened a shipyard, and he began inventing. He was a great, genius, and he invented refrigerated boats. Until then, you couldn't transport food and long distances. And that's when the Israelis arrived in the early 1960s there was nothing he couldn't do for them. And this turn about face what seemed to me, a former Nazi collaborator who was so strongly pro Israel and working with the Israelis to the point that he completely cooperated all the way to the end as the boats were going to escape, he cooperated, and for the second time in his life, he was going to against his government, and he was already a suspect. He was already in bad shape with his French government. He carried the stigma his entire life, and now he was going to do that again, but going against the government, but his love for Israel that had luckily for me, I met his biographer, a professor who did his PhD on his on his life, and he shared that research with me. And by the way, I went to a French High School in Israel, which is why I was able to read this PhD dissertation and learn the truth about this man's life and the author of this dissertation, and eventually he published a book that it in, in a book he had also written books about the Cherbourg affair, and he became my consultant to all kind of little details, like when the Israelis are invited to dinner on a Saturday night at this shipping tycoons home. Where was the home? What did they eat? What did it look like? What were the conversations all of that I got from his biographer.
That's fantastic. So is there anything you would like to mention about the book that I haven't thought to ask yet?
There's so much to this book that I would like to say that it is I mentioned. It's three parts, and the last part is belonging, and that is the important part, because when I wrote it, I wanted to bring the feelings of the 1960s the devotion to the country, patriotism, the sense that all those Jews belong together, and the Jewish Jews of Israel felt this mission to be the place for all Jews to continue to come and while Israel was fighting it for its defense. Now, all of this was written way prior to October 7, and that was a sense that I wanted to bring belonging. Little did I know how it will all come back together, unfortunately, because of the October 7 event, and how both in Israel, but Jews worldwide, all of a sudden started to feel back to this sense of belonging. And I would like I could read to you a quote of those this section, the last section of the book opens with which is actually from Somerset Maugham, and he said, "Some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not." a home they know not. Isn't that next year in Jerusalem being said for 2000 years by people whose craved, prayed, held together as people by that hope of next of the words, the the uttering of the words next year in Jerusalem, whether they were planning on the trip or not. It was that sense of that home of not, and they know not that belonging was sense that I wanted to bring, and under the unfortunate feelings of today we get it back.
Yeah. So, as I mentioned before, we put the recording on. This will be posted mid October, which will mean that it's been a year since October 7 last year, which just blows my mind. As you mentioned earlier, people thought that, you know, they place their children it'll be a few months. I don't know how many people imagine that, that the hostages would still be held a year later, that the war would still not only be going on, but be intensified, a year later, that the amount of anti semitism, well, maybe people did predict this, would be ramped up so much and that the conflicts within the Jewish community would be so divisive also. So which leads me to the question I ask everyone, if someone were either to use your book as a call to action for tikkun olam, repairing the world, or if you would like to mention anything that about Tikkun Olam? What would that be?
Tikkun olam, repairing the world has now become a Herculean task, but we need to stop talking to ourselves and be take a more courageous step to face the haters, because we talking to ourselves too much about anti semitism. The poor part is to remember that the Holocaust did not start with incinerators. It started with words. But here in the United States, we are way past words. We are into actions against Jews. Anti semitic actions are committed publicly demonizing Israel and the Jews are it's politically correct at the time that Israel is fighting an existential war against Iran and its proxies, and this lack of understanding of who is the enemy, actually naming the enemy and accusing Israel of fighting for its life as being the aggressor, is horrific. So first of all, we need to educate ourselves, but we need to take a stand against the anti Semites and what it means expose them. In my case, I had began a fight. I didn't think it was going to be a fight, right within the author's guilt, because as an author, I'd been subject to enormous amount of anti semitism in a form of showers of one star's reviews on book. My book before it even came out of the gate, by hundreds of people who could not possibly have read it, but decided as a result of there was a Tiktok radio calling to drown out and destroy this book six weeks prior to its release. So I've been suffering that as a like became the poster girl for that, but as other authors have had their events canceled and agents fire new authors who have not yet established and do not want to represent their Jewish books. So I demanded that the Author's Guild publish a statement, and it took a battle, and I'm not in a good terms with my own organization, but I forced it, and finally they came out later June with a statement against antisemitism and Islamophobia. As if there is a campaign against Muslim authors, which there isn't. So even our organization does not protect us and we need and that's what I say, tikkun olam, take a stand and make anything possible to fight within your own organizations. And this could be in any industry now, anywhere there are those who speak against you, against who I against that home. You know, not, know, not that is the right of Jews for self definition in their own land that Zionism is, is bad. What? What is the alternative? Are we supposed to be the Kurds and the Romas of the world without the land? Just mind boggling. So yes, thank you. Please speak up. Don't be embarrassed to be a Zionist, because that's who you are. That's your homeland. That's what next year in Jerusalem means.
Thank you so much for sharing that. So if someone would like to contact you, what is the best way?
My website is my name, www, Talia carner.com, T, a, l, I, A, C, A, R, N, E, R. Can find me on also on Facebook and somewhat on Instagram. Follow me on Instagram. I'm beginning to become a bit more active, but I would say, join my mailing list. I do send out a newsletter. Please sign up. And when you go on my website, just on the first page, on the home page, there is form to sign up for my newsletter.
All right, wonderful,
but you can also read about the boy with the starter to read the first couple of chapters on my website. It gives a little bit more than a sample would be on Amazon, for example.
Great. Well, I will encourage people to read those first couple chapters, because I'm sure it will get them hooked. Thank you so thank you Talia carner for speaking with me about the boy with the star tattoo.
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to share my passion and my writing with your listeners.
if you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite board and brick or online bookstore or at your local library, thanks to diyanki for use of his Freilich, which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries, and you can find more about it at www.jewishlibraries.org/nice Jewish books. I would like to thank ajl and my podcast mentor, Heidi Rabinowitz, Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
Hi. This is Erica Lyons,
and this is Christina Matula,
and we're the co authors of Mixed up Moon Cakes. We'll be joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast.
We'd like to dedicate this episode to the Hong Kong chapter of SCBWI, the Society of Book Writers and Illustrators, a wonderful supportive group through whom we met amazing writer friends, including each other.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host. Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kidlit join me to hear my conversation with Erica Lyons and Christina Matula about Mixed-up Moon Cakes at bookoflifepodcast, com.
