I haven't checked the weather, but I know it is a perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish books.
I had a fascinating talk with Talia Carner about her book The third daughter. Because her main character Batya experienced rape and sex trafficking, our conversation did sometimes get rather intense. So I just wanted to let you know that before you tuned in.
Talia Carner is a longtime global activist on women's economic and health issues, and also a longtime multi award winning writer. I'm thrilled that she's here today to speak about her work. Welcome, Talia.
So this is a second anniversary of your most recent book, the third daughter. In this book, you trace the journey of Batya, a 14 year old girl from the pale of settlement, who is tricked into a life of forced prostitution in Argentina. So how did this story come about?
Thank you for the question. The way the story came about is that it found me rather than I was looking for it. Now I knew something about it from Hebrew literature. And back in 2007, by the way, I was in Buenos Aries visiting the Jewish library at the Amia, a building that is the building that houses all of the Jewish organizations. And it was a new building after the first one had been bombed down to the ground in 1994. So I walked into the library and I was chatting with a librarian. And whatever it is, I asked her about the new archives last and then I said, What is this business with a history of prostitutes and pimps here in one Buenos Aries, and all of a sudden she forgot her English. And I thought that I committed a faux pa, I asked a question that was embarrassing, and I should not have asked, fast forward, December 2015, I went to see Fiddler on the Roof. Having grown up in Israel, I always knew that Tevya had seven daughters. I saw a film black and white in my childhood Tevye and his seven daughters, but of the many, many theatrical adaptations that have been made out of that story. And starting with actually Scholem Aleichem himself, who had written a play based upon his character of Tevya. So he went to Fiddler on the Roof version, which became iconic, we only hear the stories of three that defied the father's wishes, and married men with whom they fell in love, which was a scandle and unheard of, and Tevya and Golda, they leave the stage with two unmarried daughters. So I got the book, with it off the short stories, this particular collection, called the railroad stories, and I read what I had not read since my matriculation at the age of 18. I love the language and the culture. And then I leafed through the rest of the book, other short stories within this particular collection. And I came across the Man from Buenos Aires. And by the way, that story is now on my website, under my name, under the third daughter, and I like to be a character that we absolutely adore, a man who loves his wife is devoted to his daughters. And then who is the lay philosopher who talks to God and to his horse, giving both the questions and the answers because neither one answers. I like him. The Man from Buenos Aires gave me the creeps, and the author never actually, the character never actually tells the author in this particular short story, what's his business and the author keeps probing him, but why do you have to have a police in your back pocket? What kind of merchandise is is it that everybody knows about it, but nobody talks off, and I knew I know enough to get to modern day google. And within minutes, I was printing out dozens of articles. And I learned what this was all about. And then I thought of the librarian and says, This is the organization's for Jewish libraries. I think that's an interesting question that whether librarian in Buenos Aires should have answered my question. or was she part of the system that tried not to speak about it that had push this shameful chapter in our history into the background? And was that going to give a researcher and information
Did the librarian know that you were Jewish?
Oh, yes. First of all, I couldn't have even entered. But this was part of the maccabiah organization was taking place in Buenos Aires, the maccabiah games. My husband was the president. So I was there in a tour of the building as part of that. Yeah, it was big. And my accent is Israeli, but probably I told her that as well.
So it wasn't a matter of her trying to keep this shameful history from the outsider. She's trying to protect it from the Jews also.
It came to me later, much later, as I investigated and research that the Jews of Buenos Aries, were not happy to talk about it. And actually there's a book by Nathan Englander, the Ministry of special cases it's called. And we are interested only in the first chapter in that matter, about a stone chiseller who at night chisels off in a cemetery the names of the gravestones, because this is the prostitute Cemetery in Buenos Aires. Wow. And that particular story is set in 1982 40 years ago, which is considered two generations. So that goes back another one or two or three generations for, for those grave stones. And yes, so that is very telling about the way the Jewish community dealt with that. And I don't blame them. Are you going to tell everybody My grandfather was a pimp and that's where we are wealthy?
I think I would be a little shy about that, too. Yeah. The organization was Twi Migdal, and your character Batya tried to work to bring them down. And one thing she was concerned about was it once the organization had been dismantled or brought down what would happen to all those women who had been forced into prostitution and who were being shunned by the general population, and especially the Jewish population. So I was wondering, in real life, what did happen to those women,
In real life those women simply died, their life expectancy on the job was between two to eight years. This is time that even at the end, best countries and never Western, not a third world, developing country which Argentina was at the time, medical treatment were almost non existent. We are talking in late 1800s, early 19 hundred's the life expectancy of people was under 50. To begin with, these women died of sexually transmitted diseases, not even syphilis, which sometimes takes 10 to 20 years to develop it just immediately so even though Batyaa was concerned and they were always 1000s of them at the height Zvi Migdal employed 30,000 women, not just in Argentina, but in Brazil, in Beijing and Berlin. All over the world. It was an international traffickers rring. They even they reached Manhattan, lower east side with with a very, very big difference. For example, in Argentina, prostitution was legal. And the slavery of these women was legal. While there was an otherwise no slavery. There were no black slaves they unfortunately died a few decades earlier from some disease. But anyway, there was no official slavery in Argentina or Brazil, which were the biggest hubs for Zwi Migdal, by the way, I'll spell is ZWI MIGDAL. So it was legal and therefore, it's really that could have clubs with anywhere from six to 30 women working legally running this place where men would visit in the evening or any time during the day, smoke their cigars, do business meetings, eat play cards, it was at a club and they visited their favorite prostitutes as part of hours spent in that club. That was not possible in a country like the United States and New York, where it was not legal. So at best Zvi Migdal that could place one or two women in an apartment, but to make the kind of income they needed, and did, it required big numbers, or multiple transactions, which made them so rich. So that is anybody starts talking to me about decriminalizing prostitution. Let's talk about who that would benefit. The first of all, the pimps. Second, of course, the men who buy sex, but definitely not the victims, and therefore, I would only decriminalize the victims just for the record.
This isn't something that I had thought about earlier, but I know that in a few places in the United States, you know, especially in Nevada although not technically in Las Vegas, prostitution is legal. Have you looked at that situation? how those women are? Yes,
yes, thank you for bringing it up. Because in 10 counties in Nevada, it's legal. And supposedly the women are independent contractors, which is a very specific definition by the IRS and the Labor Department. But they are not. All of the indicators for independent contractor where they can, an independent contractor can work wherever he or she wants it, their hours in whatever location and they are free to move about. All of this does not exist in Nevada, the women who get a card to allow them to practice prostitution must deposit it in a specific brothel, they have to work only under the brothel rules. By have no benefits. They're full time employees with no benefits. They are not allowed to travel. They're not allowed to have their children live in the same town or village and a one week a month, for example, that they get off, they have to leave town, they are not allowed to engage in sex for commercial sex outside. And when they are in Nevada in the county where they practice, they're not allowed in a free hours to go to a bar to go out. So basically, these women do not make money. They leave. Their average time on the job is no more than four months. So it's a chain of brothels very often owned by the one owner with that has them and it's very political. And that's the story. This women are not happy campers, not at all, and it doesn't work for them. And I'm glad that it does not represent a role model or an a way for us to emulate elsewhere. Because they are not free women. They are just being exploited.
I want to go back to the question of the women who were forced into prostitution in Argentina and Brazil. I mentioned that most of them, they just died. They didn't really live long because of diseases. Not all of these women was unmarried. There were quite a few married women. And here is a phenomena that is as devastating as anything in this whole story. their husbands, relatively good husbands, left the old country; left the wife and a couple of children to go and seek their riches in a place where they believed that delivery the streets were paved in gold. And literally you pick precious stones. You just kick them with your toes. You pick them and he'll become very rich. Also the fruit that grew on the trees. Of course, were not just oranges that were made of gold. Needless to say they arrived and they found that they had no language skills and no marketable skills. And there were poor, just as they had been in the old country. Then comes an organization that Zwi Migdal and it says forget about the old values. Look at us. We are the new kind of economy. We are the ones who fuel this country's economy. 25% of the Argentine government budget came from brothels profit from prostitution. So we are the ones who make this country go. We look at how the police, the people in Government, the people in the military judges, they all look up to us. They all think that we are the greatest. So forget about the old values come and join us be an entrepreneur, be a businessman, as is the norm here. And you already have an asset in the form of a wife waiting for you, bring her over. Does she have a sister? How about do you have a niece? We will lend you money to buy another woman and you are in business, and entrepreneur, and businessman in the country. So needless to say a lot of these married women arrived into quite a huge surprise as to what were their husband's plans in terms of making it and then the new world. There were many divorces. But do I need to tell you how many women even today cannot fight the different circumstances in their marriage? And how many women had to accept this new life where their husbands were their pimps?
Without financial independence, there's pretty limited choices
Yeah, what did they do? There was nothing. They could not be cleaning women or workers in some factories. There was not much industry, because there were Mayan, and the local Indigenous women who were doing the menial kind of jobs. So unless a woman had the talents of let's say, being a seamstress, there was nothing else she could do in terms of being on her own. So this is part of the tragedy of this entire story that I came across and I and I came across that actually through my one of my Argentine friends, Claudia, who told me that story about her grandmother, and from what I understood, her grandmother had to stay, she couldn't escape. So that's the the part about what happened to these women that once supposedly, if they would have been emancipated, but they were never emancipated in one big scope, the demise of Zwi Migdal was in stages.
Oh, I hadn't realized that. I thought it was just brought down.
So I was wondering, since you didn't get cooperation from the library there, how you were able to go about researching this besides Google.
Okay, at that time, I'm talking 2007, that librarian would not answer my question. But once I got involved, actually, the head of Jewish archives of all of Buenos Aires, Anita Weinstein became became my consultant. So she was very helpful. She answered a lot of questions. But in addition, I don't speak a word of Spanish. So I hired two grad students, local in Argentina, a man and a woman. And I just send a very simple questions that I didn't want to bother Anita with. For example, I had black and white, grainy photos. And I asked them to identify the buildings or questions like what did people eat for breakfast or whether they were and identify for me, for example, I know Buenos Aires a bit, so if Batya walks from point A to point B, I can see on today's map, what were the names of the streets, but was the same names. 120 years ago, I needed that kind of information and by giving it to both of students I was able to make sure I get the correct answer. But also, I got these different perspectives. And I was able to cross section their responses for to enrich my details.
That actually was one of my questions, because it's one of the things that I loved in this book, and in the two other books of yours that I was able to read is that you have so many little details about the women's lives: the clothes they wear, what their rooms look like the food they eat, the expressions they use, you know, and so I love that it just made the characters real and just allowed me to see them in their environment a lot more. So I was gonna ask how you found those details, but you already answered
Well, I'd like I'd like to add another part of my research and that is Tango, as I'm sure all historical fiction writers do. They look around what else happened in that place or in a larger part of the world. And I found that, just to understand, I didn't put Batya in Buenos Aires in 1895. Scholem Aleichem did with his particularly his short stories. So now what have happened in 1895. in Buenos Aires, I found that Tango was developing, right, the ports and the brothels. So of course, Batya, became a tango dancer. But in order to write about it with authenticity, I took a year long private Tango lessons. So I got to understand the dance from inside to see what's involved that not just learn the terminology, but it's a very big macho to a kind of against submission relationship between male and female, he's the macho, she submits. But within the dance, he has to give her some space once in a while, let her show off, in which she takes control. So this is a woman whose body was not under her control did not belong to her, except for that short period of time as she dances Tango, and she's in charge. And she controls every muscle in and out. And she even controls the play, and more men who fight for her favors. So Tango became such an interesting part of the book in terms of Batya's psychic, in terms of her strength, but also is a device is within the book, because since you read the book, The Third Daughter is a very intense book, I needed to give the reader a moment to catch her breath. And the tango gave us that relief as you go up the tension ratchets, but you need to go down a little bit along that technique from from Stephen King, the bigger tension wielder of our times, so that in every sentence in every paragraph in every scene, you have both the tension but that you have to let go slightly before you wrench it up again, further up. And the tango was doing just that.
And so I'll go on a slight tangent from that on the intensity. And describing how these girls were, I don't want to say trained, broken in, they were repeatedly raped, to convince them that they were worthless, and that this was the only life they would ever be able to live. And I often consume books in two formats at the same time. So I'll listen to several chapters of the audio book on my commute. And then I'll come home and pick up the paper book or the E book and keep reading and go back and forth. But those passages were so hard to listen to. And I realized that when I'm reading, I kind of when I'm reading my eyes, I kind of skim over some of those passages, which you're not able to do in the audio book. Do you experience this and what were those passages like to write?
You know, when I write I go into a trance that is very much like a dream. You know how in a dream you everything feels very real. You hear the sounds you you smell the smells, you see the sights, you feel the weather on your skin, but mostly you feel the emotions are very, very real. And that's how I write but unfortunately, every book takes 40 rewrites in fully editing. So each one, even if it's one chapter, it doesn't have to be always The Complete Book. But every time I go back into that trance, a friend of mine said that I hypnotize myself which is the same thing. I go in, and at that moment, I experienced the same thing that you as a reader have experienced. But I must say that the draft was a lot stronger and difficult. I gave it to my husband to read and he put it down he says I cannot do this. I cannot read this, I said, "good I need to know where and how to cut and I kept cutting and cutting and cutting" And try, as difficult as those were, because all I had to read about this in my research was that this women on a passage, which took three to four weeks that they also crossing from Odessa or Constantinople to get all the way down to South America. And sometimes they of course, they stop for freight in other ports. All of these many weeks, these women were raped, starved, beaten, caged, and tortured, and upon arrival, and were forced into prostitution. So these were the only information I had, we had no first hand information from any of them. So I had to invent it by going into this kind of mode. Yes, it was very difficult. And all I can say is I kept cutting and cutting and cutting until I made it, it's still very difficult because it really had to remain authentic. But I got to the point where maybe a reader throws the book against the wall. But she picks it up again. That was my point of decision of how much stuff to keep.
To switch topics, you wear a lot of different hats. You've worked in publishing, marketing, consulted for Fortune 500 companies, taught at a university, testified before the United Nations, and work with many social justice organizations. And you obviously, write, so how do all these aspects of your life tie together, and which informs what?
I had a glorious career before I started to write fiction full time, or any fiction at all. That career lasted for almost 25 years, it was advertising, marketing, and magazine publishing, it was one career, it sounds like three different ones. But it was one career because at any point, I was involved in all of those aspects together. And within that, sometimes came social issues. And activism. For example, when I ran my last nine years in business, I ran my company, Business Women Marketing Corporation, that presented to the business world, all of the women's organizations, professional women's organizations, women's lawyers, accountants, engineers, real estate, banking, all of them together as a market to reach. But the money that we generated (over a million dollars,) went to these organizations, educational foundations. So while I was in the business world, I basically, eh, I presented this market this business that was viable against, for example, for the advertisers to advertise in Fortune and, and Business Week, and all of the business magazines that were reaching men. And here were women that we could isolate and reach them, right, where they cared and where they're involved in business. So I just created that market, but acting as a consultant to the fortune 500 companies who could not reach the Business Women's market any other way, unless they worked through me, but the money went to good causes. So that's how I combined it. And then one day I had a lobotomy, not exactly with a knife, but more an event. And that event was my 1993 visit to Russia where I went twice to teach Russian women business skills. I was sent by the US Information Agency that sent experts around the world. And if at the second time in October 93, I was caught in the uprising of the Russian Parliament against Boris Yeltsin and I ended up being on the run from the militia and finally saved when they lose our our embassy reopened and they they whisked me out of the country on the first flight. And that experience eventually made itself its way to a book called The Hotel Moscow my novel. But originally that was my maiden effort when I started to write my report to the USIA as to why I came back after four days rather than 14 days. At that time, was pre-internet almost in 1993. We have had some internet but not email in ways that we are familiar with. So I created that document in one day on November 3 1993, I had lunch with a friend who was a journalist. And I said to her, don't ask questions, use the report. All it needs it hot sex and I have a novel. She says, "Why don't you write it?" Okay, I went back to the office in 248 began to type. And at that time, it was called Hotel Sportnik, which was really the name of the hotel. But it that made an effort in get published, it got quite an attention though. And as I'm saying, 20 years later, I use the material, I couldn't even find the original document had been written on DOS, so it wasn't recovered to retrieve. But my brain still was there. And I use that material in a different way for historical fiction. But that changed my life in terms of the same issues that I cared about, found another way to write and specifically came Puppet Child as my first published novel, which is definitely a social issue about the way our justice system that's not good to protect children were being molested at home, and unfortunately puts them in the hands of their molesters. So it's not about child abuse, it is about our, our legal system. And at the time, it came out in 2002, as my first novel that was published, it was by one of the reviewers compared to John Grisham. So it's legal drama, but the subject, and then China Doll and I could talk more about the rest of my books. But basically, those say social issues came to the forefront in a new medium. Now, I always wrote, well, I just never used it to is more than a means to something else, such as reports, marketing, reviews, and so on. And they are about I was a good storyteller for my family. You can ask me a question about that if you'd like. But that's how my two separate careers have developed.
So so far, you've written about the justice system in the United States, the Jerusalem Maidan in Israel, China Doll in China, obviously, the Moscow hotel and Argentina. So which continent or country is next?
France! France is that, and I it's not that I go around looking for different countries, it's those subjects find me. And back around 2017, my husband and I were traveling around Normandy was the another couple. And I saw a road sign to a village that was not interesting to visit. But I remember that something had happened there and that it had to do with Israel. And I went back, not immediately - in few months later, I got a I found that there was a nonfiction book about that historical event. And I read it. And I still wasn't going. I wasn't thinking much about it. I was curious. And one day, I was sitting in Israel, with a friend who was a journalist, and a writer just published a book and for three years, I was consulting with her, I was helping how different ideas about how in the publishing world, and I said, you know, one day it's called the boats of Cherbourg and big event that happened involved Israel in 1969, and caused an international crisis. And I said, One day, I am going to be interested in that. A few hours later, she calls me and she said to me, "I just spoke with so and so. He's waiting for your phone call." I started screaming, and like I was in a car at the time. What I can't believe it, I just read the nonfiction book. I know that this was the number one person on their entire operation, but I didn't even imagine that he was alive. He was it turns out he was 89. When I called him the next morning, my finger literally shook. I was so much in awe of this man. And I ended up interviewing him twice at that time. And then he gave me names of other people, other commanders of this. it's a naval story. Other commanders and people involved in that story that was still alive and, and capable and available, which unfortunately, many were not. But he gave me those who were. And because of his endorsement, I ended up doing about 14 interviews that summer. And by the fall, like, I was still writing, the Third Daughter was in the middle of another book. But I realized everybody that was available was between the age of 89 and 98. I couldn't tell them wait a couple of years until I'm ready to do the research. So that's how the book started. Now during COVID gave me a lot of time, and I got another story, a fascinating story to combine with that. And so it's a human story. It's not a naval warfare, because I don't write naval warfare. I'm interested in more in the, in the human story of here.
Okay, would you say the name of the place again?
Cherbourg is the name of the village, CH, E, RB, OU RG and it's in Normandy, and the Boats of Cherbourg, you can look Wikipedia Boats of Cherbourg, you get the whole story. There are more bigger, whole books, but this is just the Wikipedia version. And you're the first one I actually reveal this, this story and the name of the novel and I am in advanced draft version. So it's not going to be out before before winter to 2023. So don't hold your breath. In the meanwhile, you can read my previous novels. But that's the name of the book is the Boy with the Star Tattoo. Okay, so that's a it's a very Jewish somewhat Zionist book, I would say. And it tells the story of our people in the 20th century.
Well, I'm very honored and tickled that you that you revealed that to me here. So thank you. So is there anything that you'd like to talk about that I haven't asked you about?
I would like to talk about what do readers take out of the novel. When I write, I don't go on a soapbox, I write about what forces me to write. And then I let things fall and see what happens. In this particular case, luckily, the Jewish Book Council gave the book, an award and a seal, second place in the book club category. And that opened up a lot of readerships and book clubs, because there's a lot to discuss. What came out of that was that that I learned the readers were taking out this story was the humanity of Batya. the humanity of a woman who is forced into prostitution, who never loses that at the core of who she is. And at no point do we, for me as the author or the readers as outsiders who take the journey with her to the ever mock her dismiss her or look down at her the way we do regard prostitutes in our society today. By taking that humanity and applying it to today's victims, because I would say 99% of all women who are engaged in giving services, sexual services are victims, they are victims that may have stopped in their childhood for so much sexual molestation and rape and sexual trauma in their lives. That being prostitutes is not the worst thing that happened to them. They have been victims for so long, they've fallen into that to be victims of a third party that benefits from selling the body. And again and again. The bigger picture here is that of my activism about against prostitution, is I just last night, yesterday afternoon, actually, I spoke to the conference of the Women of Reform Judaism that they take action, educating the members about sex trafficking, what does it mean? And what there is a lot to the parties of it. I'm not going to get into it right now.
But I want to go into the one big point in the entire industry and that is the supply and demand. My background, as you know, is the business and I studied economics. And I look at supply and demand. And what we have here is the demand that fuels the entire industry. And what is the demand, it's men who pay for sex. And unless we deal with the men who pay for sex, who create this market, who create the need, and therefore you don't have enough volunteers, and they have that gap between those volunteers to be to give sexual services to those who therefore a force create the opportunity to the to the attempts to force to use whatever means to lure women, and create a situation where they meet the demand. So we need when we deal with prostitution, yes, we need to help the victims come out. But unless we lower the demand, then for every victim that we help out, another one, at least one will be forced in to take her place. So we need to deal with the demand. And with that, I think that it's the bigger mission of the book that I had not started with a mission. But I am so happy and so gratified that it gave me the platform to I don't know if they change, but at least to educate so far 1000s of people about that.