The Lit Lifestyle: Historical Fiction! Talia Carner, THE BOY WITH THE STAR TATTOO
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and I am the host of this podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:08]I am also a newly minted USA Today best-selling author of the novel, Blake.
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[0:31]Talia Carner is the author of The Boy with the Star Tattoo, a novel. Talia, born in Israel,
[0:37]is an award-winning author of six historical and psychological suspense novels that shed light
[0:43]on social indignities and unexplored historical events. Formerly the publisher of Savvy Woman
[0:49]magazine and a lecturer at International Women's Economic Forums, this trailblazer of projects
[0:55]centered on women's issues has turned her energy to fight for Israel. She lives in New York
[1:00]Welcome Talia. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss
[1:05]the boy with the star tattoo. Thank you so much for having me on your program.
[1:10]Your book has gotten so much attention, not only for positive reasons, but as a target,
[1:15]the content is so good. Your great writer, the story is so important, especially now.
[1:21]Tell listeners both about what first, what the story is about, and then I want to talk about
[1:27]sort of your the launch of this book into the crazy world in which we live right now.
[1:32]Yeah, the very brief description is that the assistant of an Israeli naval officer stationed
[1:41]in Shabook, France in late 1968, is obsessed in trying to figure out what happened
[1:52]to in his life to have brought him from at the age of four, from a quaint French village,
[2:01]as a child offering to Israel through youth, Aliyah, and now he is an Israeli officer.
[2:10]What happened? Who were the parents? And there is one big clue. And that is,
[2:17]he has a star tattoo at the bottom of his foot, and she follows a breadcrumb of pens
[2:25]throughout France. And in the process, we get to see two particular themes of the novel.
[2:34]One is youth Aliyah, which is the rescue of Jewish offense, post-World War II,
[2:42]and bring them to then Palestine. And the second one, a very amazing event 1969 escape of the boats
[2:53]of Shabook, when the Israeli Navy stole its own boats that were held back by the French embargo.
[3:03]That would be the background of the book through which like the framework in which the rest
[3:11]of the story takes place. Well, the way you set it up and the immediacy with which you write,
[3:18]you feel like you're there. And you bring us along the way as we, in our heads, we connect
[3:23]some of the dots, which is always very exciting. I'm like, is this person this person? The reader has
[3:30]to be engaged in the discovery of all of it as well. And you feel some of these horrors and some
[3:36]of these joys and relief and then devastation and all of the emotions wrapped up in that time
[3:43]of life. And I guess life in general, but particularly that time, tell me about how you got some of
[3:49]that context to make it so real. The details about that. It started with a passing comment.
[3:59]Well, it started with a road sign when I saw my husband and I was driving in,
[4:05]my dear friends, and I saw the sign to Sherbrooke, and we didn't go in. But as we drove on,
[4:13]on, we realized I knew something very important that that happened. And that is this incredible
[4:20]event that was the biggest, most public execution of ingenuity on behalf of the idea,
[4:32]which the Navy is part of the idea in Israel, all the parts, the air, the air, the ground,
[4:39]and sea, and intelligence, a part of the idea. So, but only five years later, there was another
[4:47]event that overshadowed it, called the Antebi Raid. But back to this, I remember that, and I read
[4:55]after that passing, I read about it, almost forgot it. And then I mentioned in passing in a visit
[5:04]to Israel, to an Israeli journalist, that one day I was going to look into it. I was writing at that
[5:11]time, my previous novel, the third daughter. A few hours later, she calls me and says,
[5:19]Admiral Haddard came for his waiting for your call, and I was flat again because I didn't even
[5:25]know he was alive. I now knew the name just because I read about it relatively recently. And
[5:33]I called him, he was 89 years old, now he's 95. And he immediately said, hop on the train,
[5:43]I was in Tel Aviv, come to Haifa, and I made you there. I developed into a lovely relationship,
[5:50]I met him several times subsequently, and he then opened his flip phone and gave me the
[5:59]contacts for 14 other people who were alive and coherent. So, I felt that, okay, I didn't have time
[6:11]for them, but everyone of this list who was between the age of 89 and 98. And I had to tell,
[6:19]I'm waiting a couple of years until I have time with for you. And that was not practical, so I
[6:25]interviewed them, found myself by the end of the summer that it was 1917. I decided to go to
[6:35]Chobot, but I had a problem. And that is, I don't write naval warfare. I write about social issues
[6:42]and moral dilemma. I write about the human angst. So, I had one thing I trusted myself that when I
[6:52]walked those cobblestone alleys, the story would come to me. And sure enough, that's what happened
[6:59]by the third day Sharon showed up. Sharon, I knew her. She was, she had had a cameo appearance
[7:09]in the epilogue of my novel Jerusalem made and had it been published. There were used prior,
[7:17]but I know her very well, and she happened to be in 1969. It's like 1968, it's where we started
[7:24]with a project. And she's in Paris. And she's 20 years old. She's right out of the idea of what
[7:32]she served in as an intelligence analyst. She was perfect. And I know her family. And she led me
[7:41]to that second thread because her mother had been an orphan that had been rescued by
[7:48]Uphalia. And it's a story I always wanted to tell. So that was already built in into that epilogue
[7:56]of several years prior. The readers do not need to read both books in order. They're not connected.
[8:04]And they may have fun reading Jews are limited. But then it's not necessary. But from that point on,
[8:12]I had my protagonist and the theme of Uphalia that was going to take me through. And of course,
[8:20]a personality she already shows it in that epilogue in the previous book. Well, so when you're meeting
[8:30]all of the that's extraordinary, by the way, that your pads got to cross with and get all this
[8:35]primary research. So when you're doing that, how, like, how do you get the most out of all the men
[8:41]to find out all the stories? What do you do? You sit with them for hours or, like, paint a picture
[8:45]for me of how you do it. Yes. So once I have those contacts, I interviewed them, and I'm mostly
[8:52]by far on the FaceTime because I did it over a period of time. But also another, so and then I
[9:01]went on the internet because these were all officers or I had the children of the officers who
[9:09]had been children at the time. They came with their fathers and the mothers were there. The
[9:15]family arrived and settled in Shurbok. Now they were in the mid to late 60s. But they told me
[9:23]there were different things very important that they told me with fantastic information,
[9:29]like about Philek Samiyot or one kid who had went to first grade and he gave, they gave you a
[9:37]little, literally, a slate with a chalk. This is how they taught children to write at that time,
[9:44]not with a pen and pencil. I would never receive that information. But Philek Samiyot is a character. We
[9:52]don't have much time to talk about it now. But anybody who has ever read the biography of course,
[10:00]Koshanel, he appears he's the guy who outfoxed.
[10:04]Koshanel, when she tried to steal the part of her Jewish partners
[10:09]during the World War II, the worth timers, and they fled.
[10:13]And she thought, oh, OK, now I'm going to get it
[10:17]to find out that they sold it to Philippe Samuel.
[10:20]We meet him 25 years later.
[10:22]There are a lot more dilemmas that are involved
[10:26]with this character that I got to absolutely love
[10:29]for people who knew him personally.
[10:33]There was another two threads to my research,
[10:39]which were fantastic coincidence.
[10:41]One, I was not going to go into the French side
[10:45]because I'm not an investigative journalist.
[10:48]And I had enough material to tell from these really side.
[10:53]But I watched videos and so on.
[10:56]And when I wasn't sure book, I could not go into that shipyard
[11:01]because in a 47-year sense, it had been converted
[11:05]into a nuclear submarine with manufacturer.
[11:08]And I couldn't just knock on the door of the sentries.
[11:11]They may have just looked around here
[11:13]and the nucleus of marine factory.
[11:16]But lo and behold, somebody made a connection.
[11:20]I said, why don't you contact the CEO of so-and-so?
[11:24]And I, oh, my God.
[11:26]I contacted him by the me to visit.
[11:29]And he gave me other contacts that I was looking for,
[11:32]and particularly journalists that I had been looking
[11:35]for four years and a half who had, at the time,
[11:38]it was nine old men covered the events.
[11:41]I don't know if it's too much information.
[11:43]But it was going on from one thing to another to another.
[11:49]And so that French journalist, I was on the phone
[11:53]with him in French because I went to a French high school
[11:58]in Israel.
[11:59]But so he's talking to me.
[12:01]So I changed it.
[12:02]My husband was with me.
[12:04]I put it in a speaker and switched to English
[12:08]because my name was wrong, was educated in Oxford.
[12:12]So my husband was here in a conversation.
[12:16]He says, tell him you'll come in the spring.
[12:19]So I said, I'm coming in the spring.
[12:22]I made 500 friends.
[12:24]So he invited us to his house in a French Alps.
[12:29]He was by that time, by 1845.
[12:32]And so it wasn't, and it got me incredible information.
[12:37]And so I had more information than I needed.
[12:40]And again, I wanted to focus on a human drama
[12:44]and a personal story.
[12:45]The other thing that, as the story involved,
[12:48]it went into the lower valley.
[12:52]And I did not know the lower valley.
[12:55]I done, now it's COVID and I can travel there.
[12:58]So I had maps on the floor of my office
[13:01]where sitting here in this nest that I have on top of the house.
[13:06]And I called it my pigeon nest.
[13:09]And I was on a phone on a zoo with the historians
[13:14]and tour guides.
[13:19]And I had to be specifically around a particular shatosh,
[13:23]a total of all who said, that had a very interesting history
[13:28]related to something to the German invasion.
[13:31]We're not going to go again.
[13:33]OK.
[13:34]Yes.
[13:35]But I looked at the various villages
[13:41]and ended up selecting them by using drones.
[13:45]So I powered with drones over those villages.
[13:50]I needed to know where's the church and where's
[13:53]the river and where's the marketplace.
[13:57]And this is the inside.
[13:59]Inside, look into how to write historical fiction, right?
[14:02]This is it, and then by October 2021,
[14:08]I was finally able to go there.
[14:10]That was my fifth trip.
[14:12]And I found on the ground that one particular town
[14:16]that I, in story, was involved, was not
[14:20]appropriated, didn't work out, as I had thought from the air.
[14:25]I also had the opportunity to attend a conference
[14:30]of Huguenots, who they're a Protestant living
[14:34]in the Lual Valley who saved Jews.
[14:39]And they happened to have a conference on the Gentiles
[14:46]who saved Jews.
[14:50]And Yad Vashem has this category.
[14:54]And they were discussing that.
[14:55]And I'm sitting there like a fly on the wall
[14:58]on Zoom listening to their discussion
[15:01]and learning so much about how they saved Jews
[15:04]during the Holocaust.
[15:06]We didn't, I didn't use it other than because my book
[15:10]is not about a Holocaust.
[15:12]It's what happened after.
[15:13]Because one major question I had was,
[15:17]how do you discover, find Jewish orphans?
[15:21]It and agent go from, farmhouse to farmhouse
[15:26]and not on the door.
[15:28]And he said, do you have any to have the Jewish kid here?
[15:32]Let me take her across the Mediterranean
[15:36]to a country whose language she doesn't speak
[15:39]and let people who've raised her now for four years
[15:43]said, sure, made no sense?
[15:48]Yet we know that this is what happened in New South Korea.
[15:52]So, by the way, with the going into what's
[15:55]happening in the attacks, I did recently,
[15:59]I never owned a Jewish star.
[16:01]I just recently bought it six weeks ago.
[16:06]And I wanted it shiny, I should have put it at first.
[16:10]I wanted it shiny so when I deliver presentations,
[16:15]they can see it.
[16:17]Yeah, they're looking at the universe.
[16:18]Really beautiful.
[16:19]Yes, and that brings us to the anti-Semitic attack.
[16:23]Yes, it is horrific.
[16:25]It's a modern version of burning,
[16:30]1933, burning of Jewish books.
[16:34]Yes, except that they now have,
[16:36]they don't have to put a big fire of no methods
[16:41]through the internet that can bomb books,
[16:44]can destroy authors and very luckily the Jewish communities.
[16:49]I don't even know who they are,
[16:52]but bloggers and reviewers kind of circle their wagons
[16:57]around me before my book even came out
[17:01]and those attacks begin.
[17:03]But now we have the list,
[17:06]which is another story that, again,
[17:10]we won't go into that too much unless you want it to come.
[17:13]No, no, there is another list this morning.
[17:16]And everybody on this morning?
[17:18]Yeah, I just got another, there's another one.
[17:21]There's always more, it's just crazy.
[17:23]I guess, I mean, what we're talking about
[17:25]for those listening is that there are so many
[17:28]and you probably already know this listeners,
[17:29]but that there are so many lists circulating
[17:32]of Jewish authors or even authors sympathetic
[17:35]to Jewish people, which is really crazy,
[17:38]but I mean, the whole thing is crazy,
[17:40]but lists circulating of what people have said,
[17:42]what the involvement is,
[17:44]and essentially blacklisting people
[17:46]who we should not, people are saying,
[17:48]we should not support people like the two of us
[17:50]and others, which is honestly terrifying.
[17:53]It's terrifying on so many levels,
[17:55]not just personally, but societally.
[17:58]It's just the whole climate right now,
[18:00]I find absolutely terrifying,
[18:02]and I'm sure you do too, I'm sure everybody does,
[18:05]but your book and you as an early target,
[18:09]I feel like you were the first one
[18:11]who was totally like destroyed
[18:13]and before everyone else.
[18:15]I don't know, it's just I never,
[18:17]did you think this could happen again?
[18:18]I never thought this could happen again,
[18:20]but maybe I grew up in the Israel
[18:24]and I have the sense of security of my identity.
[18:29]We call it pride, I don't even feel it,
[18:32]it's just who I am.
[18:34]I don't give it much thought
[18:36]because just like you don't give thought,
[18:38]like I'm a woman and I'm totally right, period.
[18:41]And it's so, my husband always said
[18:45]that I grew up in Brooklyn,
[18:48]that I was not sensitive to situations
[18:51]where he viewed as anti-Semitic.
[18:54]I never experienced direct anti-Semitism
[18:57]until six weeks prior to the release
[19:01]of my novel, the book, the boy with the starter too.
[19:06]When, oh my God, the shower, shower of one stars
[19:12]on good weeks and good weeks refusal to remove them
[19:17]even though they have a policy against anti-harassment.
[19:23]And in my case, the harassment starts
[19:26]with two videos on TikTok.
[19:29]So that it's a call for the campaign.
[19:32]So it's proven that it is a campaign for harassment.
[19:38]So they don't even have any question to remove all of that.
[19:43]But they have refused.
[19:45]And so far, HarperCollins didn't succeed in that,
[19:50]Jewish book console is doing things,
[19:52]when I'm not yet sure what.
[19:53]The fact is, I think somebody told me at the idea,
[19:57]but basically we are on our...
[20:00]own without any defense. I think it's because the bigger picture is Israel's survival right
[20:09]now. People don't understand a lot of too many hundreds of thousands of useful idiots who
[20:17]have no idea what they're doing and what they're chanting. Don't realize that if the war
[20:26]Israel, if the Palestinians stopped the war to be no more killing, not a single killing,
[20:32]it's done, it's over, the war is over. If Israel stopped, there would be massacred and the
[20:39]Israel has now war in the South but it's a worse war coming up in the North and we already seen a
[20:47]run attack it. Two weeks ago, over 340 missiles, likely missed but if it were 1,000 or 2,000 missiles,
[20:58]Israel's existential survival is at question and all of this Israel hatred,
[21:05]ages who show up this, you know, people say, oh I'm not a racist except when it comes to the Jews
[21:14]and Israel. We can talk about that for an hour and not an hour. But I try to put things in perspective.
[21:22]Yes, so my book is gonna be bought but luckily I've been embraced by the Jewish community because
[21:29]of the subject that deals with two Israeli related events but said in France, my book tour which
[21:39]has 50 in-person events, an including zoo between February 1 when it came out to the end of June,
[21:46]this just for in the five months I have 50 in-person events and they're all in the Jewish community,
[21:55]all with audiences ranging from let's say 75 to 700 people, huge groups, I'm very well received,
[22:05]I'm feeling raised, the book is being selling well with viewers like it. I must say that probably
[22:14]I get less of the general media reviews than I used to get before but that's part of the territory.
[22:24]I knew that I was writing a book that had to do with Israel. I just never thought this was going to
[22:30]go this far insane. You say you write about moral dilemmas just and I know we're almost out of time
[22:36]but I could talk to you all day and probably well at other times but how did you arrive at that?
[22:40]That you are an author who writes about moral dilemmas. Where did that come from?
[22:45]It's the question of what what makes a story pop up and that is when every character,
[22:53]small, mere secondary has to deal with some moral dilemma. Life is black and white,
[23:02]except they're gray areas which makes the reader think well what would I have done? The reader gets
[23:10]engaged even in a small question that a minor character may face. So the entire, any one of my books
[23:23]involves moral dilemmas of the different characters. Amazing. Are you working on another book now?
[23:31]When I have time, every time I think okay this is the last novel. Out of ideas,
[23:40]I don't search for ideas. I wait for them to come to me and sure enough it hit me on the head
[23:47]with a club and that's what usually happens and I realize that it's a subject that I've been
[23:53]interested in. For many, many, many years and they are the questions that had been in my head
[24:00]that I had not explored. The problem is is I don't have time now. I hope to spend more for
[24:08]summer to write it. I have about close to a hundred pages of what we call shitty first draft.
[24:16]Half of it may be thrown, but it takes me about four or five years. I don't put pressure on myself.
[24:27]I let the novel flow out of me. The research is needed. If the story goes in a different direction,
[24:37]I let it flow for a while and I try not to take it too far into places I don't need to be,
[24:45]but I let the ideas flow and it's very much for me like being in a trance like in a dream.
[24:56]Know how a dream is a youth now experienced writing your first fiction and I think you must have
[25:03]been in that kind of a state when you're so much with your protagonist. I compare it to the moments
[25:12]where I'm in a trance. I see the side side, hear the sounds. I'm inside my eye, I crawl under the
[25:21]skin of my protagonist, but mostly I feel the emotions. The way you feel in the dream, they're very
[25:27]real. You have a little bit more logic when you're right to novel than when a dream
[25:37]seems to jump around, but basically that's how I let a scene develop. I close my eyes,
[25:44]I literally close my eyes and I type like this and then I have a lot of fixing, but I'm totally
[25:52]I love it. Wow and you're such a storyteller even writing talking about how you write as a story.
[25:58]So anyway, Talia, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. Mom's don't have time to read books,
[26:04]the boy with the star tattoo and thank you for being such a great representation of a strong,
[26:12]creative, wonderful Jewish woman out in the world. Thank you. Thank you. I must add that
[26:21]even though it's a Jewish book, Nelson de Mel gave it, they say that the blurb actually, yes,
[26:29]the blurb here is from Kelly Remer actually, but Nelson de Mel said his historical fiction
[26:37]don't get better than that boy with the star tattoo. There you go. Yeah, not just for Jewish people.
[26:44]Yeah, but for him to say, doesn't get better than that. I mean, couldn't have said it's very nice.
[26:52]I was really, really flattered. So thank you. That's amazing. Wow, congratulations. Well deserved.
[27:00]Thank you. Okay, bye bye. Thanks for listening to mom's don't have time to read books.
[27:08]If you love it, please leave a review and follow us on social at city Owens and at city readers.