This past Wednesday, August 12th, Talia Carner spoke to Hadassah Nassau, via Zoom, about her fifth novel, The Third Daughter (2019). (Hadassah is a national women’s Zionist organization.)
The novel’s protagonist is 14-year-old Batya,
the third of Koppel’s four daughters. The beginning of her novel brings the pogrom scene in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof strongly to mind, but hers has much darker tones. (Fiddler on the Roof was a musical adaption of Sholem Aleichem’s book, Tevye’s Daughters).
“The father [in my novel] was definitely
Tevye,” said Carner. “I was inspired by Sholem
Aleichem to continue in his spirit, his words, to write about the character.”
Carner’s novel begins shortly after a devastating pogrom: Koppel’s family lost their home, and Batya saw her friend, Miriam killed in the violence. About a day after the pogrom, Koppel and his family get some unexpected good fortune when they meet the wealthy and charming Yitzik Moskowitz, who wanted to marry Batya. He says he will take her to America and she will live a better life. He promises the family that he will wait for her to turn 16 before marrying her. He also promises that his sister will take care of her until then. Batya’s family rejoiced, but she was scared to death and she could not understand why she was afraid of Moskowitz. She acquiesced to these plans because she wanted to please her family. After Moskowitz and Batya were far away from her family, he raped her repeatedly. Then he put her on a boat to Argentina, sending her to his sister. The only thing that Moskowitz was truthful about was that his sister would “take care” of Batya. His sister was a madam who ran a house
of prostitution. She made Batya a prostitute and treated her as cruelly as her other sex workers.
Moskowitz soon showed up in Buenos Aires, but not to marry Batya. He already had a wife and children. Batya was nothing more than his property. He had no love for her nor for any of the other young girls he had lured away from their families. Moskowitz was part of the Jewish sex trafficking ring Zwi Migdal, which brought Jewish girls from Eastern Europe to Argentina and sold them as sex slaves. This organization actually existed from the late 19th century until the middle of the 20th. A lot of the novel’s content was based on this shameful chapter of Jewish history.
Carner first learned about the horrors of sex trafficking while in Beijing in 1995. She began to understand how countless sex workers suffered.
“I don’t think I thought about them at all before that,”
said Carner. “I’d see them on street corners, but it was never like I
could do something for anybody.”
Twenty years after Beijing, in 2015, Carner read Sholem Aleichem’s short story, The Man from Buenos Aires, about the Jewish sex trafficking trade. In the story, an Argentinian Jew bragged to Sholem Aleichem about his business, which had made him wealthy. When Sholem Aleichem asked the man his business, he answered:
“My merchandise? Ha-ha! Well, I’m not peddling Hanukkah candles.” (Cited at https://www.taliacarner.com/th…)
“That story gave me the creeps,” said Carner.
Carner’s Moskowitz character was based on Sholem Aleichem’s fictitious Argentinian character.
When asked what truly inspired her to write specific novels, Carner answered:
“Sometimes a road sign a sentence, or a word can inspire me.”
To learn more about Talia Carner, log onto www.taliacarner.com