We have a winner! Both the novel and the book group of the month!

(Note: This blog was sent to the mailing list in early December 2019) WISHING YOU ALL THE BEST IN THIS HOLIDAY SEASON! "THE THIRD DAUGHTER" book clubs' monthly promotion:

We have the first drawing of a winner!  South Beach Book Club (Florida) has had a wonderful event into which I also Skyped. This group photo was drawn from several others submitted, and the group won the beautiful shawl, a replica of the one worn by the protagonist on the cover of THE THIRD DAUGHTER. Please continue to mail me your book club photos--and please contact me ahead of time to schedule a Skype visit, at AuthorTalia@aol.com . I often join at the second part of the meeting, after the members have had a chance to discuss the book on their own, exchange opinions and bring up some questions. There is no greater pleasure for an author than to share her work with appreciative audience, and I encourage you to contact not only me, but try other authors (via their websites.) I am certain that, time permits, many of my fellow novelists would be delighted to hear from you. No less important, of course, are your reviews. Amazon and GoodReads--as well as your favorite social media venues--are great places to post even a couple of lines of your impressions and let other readers know.

The mind-boggling historical secret revealed--and the surprising inspiration for the novel!

Set in the late 1800s in Buenos Aires, THE THIRD DAUGHTER is a story of a young Jewish woman lured under false promise of marriage from Russia to South America, where she's forced into prostitution. With faith and fortitude, she struggles to free herself, while trying to bring down the powerful traffickers' ring. Historically true, THE THIRD DAUGHTER was inspired by Sholem Aleichem's short story, The Man from Buenos Aires, that appeared in the same collection as Tevye the Dairyman. I invented the story of one of Tevye's daughters after the family flees a pogrom (--a sequel to Fiddler on the Roof.) They meet this mysterious, shady man, who lures the daughter from Russia to Argentina with a false promise of marriage--only to force her into a brothel.   Zwi Migdal was a legal union of traffickers headquartered in Buenos Aires, that operated with impunity for 70 years. THE THIRD DAUGHTER is a tribute to the estimated over 150,000 Jewish girls and women whose haunting voices impelled me to tell their truth.... But as the iconic Phyllis Chesler writes in her endorsement, the novel has "a satisfying, redemptive ending!"

A 1925 film dramatizing a cargo of "brides" heading from Russia to South America. (Source: "Jewish Luck," by director Alexis Granowsky.)

HOTEL MOSCOW (my previous novel) is Amazon Kindle's choice--at only $1.99 !

What a great compliment to the sustainability of this novel of Russia emerging from communism--and the effects of corruption on its people, particularly women--that Amazon has singled out this award-winning novel for Kindle's discounted monthly promotion! Here is what NYT bestselling authors said about HOTEL MOSCOW when it was released in 2015: "...Hotel Moscow is a finely-drawn tale of a country emerging from its dark Soviet past into a present overshadowed by a new kind of terror and lawless corruption that will keep the reader mesmerized.... A wonderful evocation of time and place and an insightful post-Cold War thriller which reminds us that in Russia the more that changes, the more that stays the same.” -- Nelson DeMille author of Radiant Angel “With the urgency of a thriller and the sharp, atmospheric lens of a great documentary, HOTEL MOSCOW hurls you into the vortex of  the corrupt, outlaw world of the Soviet Union morphing into modern Russia. A fascinating and ultimately, gripping read!" -- Andrew Gross, author of One Mile Under "Talia Carner sweeps us away along with her brave and determined heroine to an exotic and complex time and place, and keeps us riveted with the tension and dangers of international intrigue. A real page-turner!" -- Tami Hoag, author of Cold Cold Heart  TO DOWNLOAD $1.99  HOTEL MOSCOW, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Please join me for an engaging literary event:

I do not do "readings," but rather deliver thought-provoking talks about the social issues behind each of my novels. Audiences and event organizers find them "enriching," "extraordinary," "engaging," "superbly performed," "eye-opening," and "unforgettable."  (You may check testimonials here.)

BNC Hartford (CT) Chapter, October 2019 My book tour for THE THIRD DAUGHTER continues. In the coming months you'll find me in New York Metro and Florida. For registration information (some events are limited to members,) please check my Book Tour page.  Tuesday, January 7, 2029, 7:00 PM Women’s League Book Club B’nai Torah Congregation, 6261 SW 18th Street Boca Raton, FL Tuesday, January 21st, 2020, 10 AM Trustees luncheon Jewish Women Foundation of the Greater Palm Beaches Temple Beth El West Palm Beach Monday, February 10, 2020, 11:30 AM Brandeis National Committee (BNC) Treasure Coast Chapter 21st Annual Literary Luncheon Island Dunes Country Club Jensen Beach, FL Tuesday, February 11, 2020, 1:30 PM Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) Conversations Sarasota, FL Wednesday, February 19, 2020, 12:00 noon Ponte Vecchio 7050 Catania Dr. Boynton Beach, FL Wednesday, February 26, 2020, 9:30 AM & 1:30 PM “Conversations with Jewish Women Writers” Jewish Federation of the Palm Beaches Friedman Center for Jewish Education Palm Beach Country Club Palm Beach, FL Thursday, February 27, 2020, 1:30 PM “Conversations with Jewish Women Writers” Jewish Federation of the Palm Beaches Friedman Center for Jewish Education Frenchman’s Creek Beach & Country Club Palm Beach, FL Friday, March 6, 2020, 10:00 AM Annual Book & Author Luncheon Brandeis National Committee Wellworth, Wellington, Wycliffe, Delray and Trails Chapters Wycliffe Golf Club & Country Club Wycliffe, FL Sunday, March 8, 2020, 5:30 PM Galbut Family Miami Beach JCC 4221 Pine Tree Drive Miami Beach, FL Thursday, March 19, 2020, 9:30 AM Hadassah Valencia Reserve Boynton Beach, FL Friday, March 20, 2020, 12:30 PM (TBC) United Nations Commission on the Status of Women UN Building, New York, NY Sunday, March 22, 2020, 10:00 AM Book & Author Event Neve Shalom 250 Grove Ave, Metuchen, NJ Monday, March 23, 2020, 3:00 PM Peninsula Public Library 280 Central Ave Lawrence, NY Tuesday, March 31, 2020, 5:30 PM Jewish Women’s Foundation of Boca Raton Boca Raton, FL Sunday, April 19, 2020, 11:30 AM Temple Israel of New Rochelle 100 Pinebrook Blvd New Rochelle 10804 Wednesday, April, 22, 2020, 8:15 PM Sisterhood East Meadow Jewish Center East Meadow, (Long Island) NY Thursday, April 23, 2020, 10:30 AM Sid Jacobson JCC East Hills, (Roslyn, Long Island,) NY For registration, please click. Sunday, May 3, 2020, 9:00 AM Temple Beth Sholom Sisterhood 1901 Kresson Road, Cherry Hill, NJ 08003 Thursday, May 7, 2020, 11:00 AM Hadassah Nassau Region Rockville Centre, LI Saturday, May 9, 2020, 1:00 PM Port Washington Library 1 Library Drive, Port Washington, NY Wednesday, May 13, 2020,  11:30 AM (TBD) Commack Hills Hadassah Dix Hills Jewish Center 555 Vanderbilt Parkway Dix Hills, NY Tuesday, June 9, 2020, 3:00 PM (novel: JERUSALEM MAIDEN) Après Midi Café Le Marais Paris Tuesday, June 16, 2020, 2:00 PM Glen Cove Library 4 Glen Cove Ave, Glen Cove, NY Thursday, June 18, 2020, 11:30 AM BOOK & AUTHOR Migdal Hadassah North Shore Towers Little Neck, NY Sunday, July 12, 2020, 3:00 PM John Jermain Memorial Library 201 Main Street Sag Harbor, NY  (To schedule an event with me, please contact my event coordinator, Lisa Bernard at MecoxHudson@gmail.com or (203)919-8406 )

Thank you for your interest and support--and wishing you a great holiday season! Talia www.TaliaCarner.com P.S. You may read the first chapter of THE THIRD DAUGHTER on my website--and of course, order at your local indie store, on B&N, Amazon, and iTunes. P.P.S. The novel is available also in LARGE PRINT!

Some fun book tour highlights of 2015:

Starting 2016 with a bang!

       For my first of many keynote speaking events scheduled for the coming months, at Hadassah Cascades in Florida, I’ve had the pleasant task of pre-autographing all the 190 copies of my novel, HOTEL MOSCOW! It was included in the price of the brunch, and as always, my talk was not about the book itself but rather about issues relating to its background. (Organizers can choose from 4 suggested topics.)

Please check the list of many events coming up in Florida, Arizona, New York and New Jersey, and hopefully you’ll join me.(If you read the testimonials you'll see why my presentations are not to be missed.)

Some fun highlights of 2015:

         In my December newsletter I promised to highlight some of the many memorable/ unusual activities surrounding my book launch of HOTEL MOSCOW. It's hard to pick just a few from the series of events starting with the celebrity-studded book launch party at the Manhattan's famous Friars Club to the exhilarating luncheons and dinners where I connected with appreciative readers. I love the TV and radio interviews, which I invite you to watch/listen. But here is a look at "behind-the-scene":

1)  A tasty morsel to go with the novel: The request for a recipe to for a book-group meeting in which the novel is discussed brought out my culinary creativity. So here is my recipe for a Blini Caviar. It's easy to make for your next book meeting--and please remember to contact me to Skype your book discussion! 

2)  HOTEL MOSCOW was honored with the USA Books News award in the multi-cultural category.

The novel tells a universal story about people going through a political upheaval. Does the fall of a totalitarian regime mean that people wake up to Democracy--or to chaos and lawlessness? I hope that if you have not yet read this suspenseful, historical novel you will do so soon and get the inside view of this thought-provoking experience.

3) Authors’ endorsements:

The blurbs that HOTEL MOSCOW received from NYT bestselling authors were the ultimate

affirmation, and each took my breath away. It is a huge sacrifice for a working novelist—often under a contract to produce a new book each year—to take the time to read a full-length novel and lend his/her reputation to endorsing it. I am grateful to the many authors that have found HOTEL MOSCOW so worthy of their names—Nelson DeMille, Andrew Gross, Tami Hoag, Ellen Meister and many others!

4) Reviews:

As an author I toil in solitude and silence for about 5 years on each novel. Then comes the Big Bang

when the story is thrust out to the world and is embraced by both taste-makers and readers. Both ends of the process—the lonesome creative and its ultimate public reception—are equally satisfying, especially when my latest “baby” has received accolades such as:

“Stunning,” “A compelling narrative,” “Gripping,” “Unflinching and unforgettable,” "Skilled and vivid writing," "Fascinating," "An ambitious, timeless story," "Intriguing," “An eye-opening exposé ,” "Awesome," “Thought-provoking,” “A can’t-put-it-downer,”  “Action-packed, steamy and suspenseful,” “A moving, poignant, and heartening novel.”

All describe what I had sought to achieve in writing HOTEL MOSCOW.

5) Mah-Jongg tournament:

At a Book & Author luncheon in St. Petersburg, Florida, where I planned to arrive the night before, the organizers got a whiff of my love of Mah-Jongg. They asked me to participate in a special fund-raiser dinner and proceeded to sell tickets for attendees to play Mah-Jongg with the author! The fun was all mine.

6) HOTEL MOSCOW in Costco!

In its month-long run, the novel did so well that Costco continued the promotion for two more weeks.

From my very personal diary:

Some of you know that my husband, Ron, is the president of Maccabi USA. Over Christmas/ New Year we had the extraordinary experience of attending the Maccabi Pan-Am Games in Santiago, Chile, where the USA brought 400 Jewish athletes to compete against over 20 teams. It is a highly effective cultural- and Jewish-identity program that brings dispersed Diaspora communities together. It was a chance for me to reconnect with South-American friends I've made these past 30 years.

Finally,

In thanking you all, I’d like to offer you bookmarks. Many readers appreciate them, and I can send up to 30 at a time. Please write me at AuthorTalia@aol.com , and I will be delighted to mail them to you.

Thanks again, and wishing you all a great 2016!

Talia Carner

www.TaliaCarner.com

P.S. If you’ve read HOTEL MOSCOW, please post a review on Amazon or GoodReads. (Even a line or two would suffice--unless, of course, you want to articulate more.) If you haven't read the novel yet, here are links for both the trade paperback--about $12--or the digital format. 

"Unorthodox," a memoir by Deborah Feldman

An examination of an insular world is best described by an insider--especially one who's never felt she belonged in this world, yet was pinned to its dogmas and unbending religious fanaticism.

Deborah Feldman's difficult upbringing was clouded and severely compromised by the absence of her parents: Her borderline mentally disabled father had been matched to marry an impoverished yet intelligent teenager from a distant community, who took off shortly after Deborah was born to fend for herself and to get education and a life. As a result, the young Deborah was abandoned into the care of her grandparents, loving but bound to austerity both by religious norms and personal histories as Holocaust survivors.

What should have amazed me (but didn't) when reading Deborah Feldman's "Unorthodox," was how little had changed in that world set in Brooklyn, NY, from 100 years ago in a similar ultra-Orthodox society in Jerusalem, yet how much had.... In my research into the lives of women in Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire rule of the Holy Land, I found women living in a highly restrictive Jewish religious society marked on the outside by its adherence to exaggerately modest clothing (and head-shaving for married women,) and subject to decrees, rules, male-dominant religious hierarchy and strict social expectations that forced the public into every private domain. Then and now, every transgression was watched closely by others, and manifestations of individuality cut at the bud. The difference was that in Jerusalem of the time, women suffered the lack of personal freedoms underpinned by shortages, plagues and pestilence with more stoic acceptance--even spiritual exuberance--because they had a mission: suffering and "building a home" in the holy city helped hasten the messiah's arrival and thus bring salvation to world Jewry. Not so in Feldman's milieu in the Satmar community in Brooklyn, just within sight of the Manhattan skyline. There was no apparent spiritual foundation to justify the imposition of extreme strict norms of conduct and of education that was no more than indoctrination to further stave off outside influences. At least it was not apparent to Feldman, nor instilled in girls and women relegated to the back of the synagogue and (then and now) excluded from active participation in religious services.

A free spirit, open-minded, intelligent Deborah suffered both from low social standing as a result of her dubious parentage and from emotional detachment that often accompanies parentless children. In the close-knit society of a few city blocks, she forever felt as an outcast. Her grandparents fed her well and clothed her in hand-me downs from her cousins, and loved her in their own distracted ways. And unlike the ceaseless labor often imposed on girls in large Satmar families, the grandparents made little physical demands of Deborah: her help in her grandmother's housecleaning and long days in the kitchen seemed more voluntary rather than forced. Society's total control came into young Deborah's life in the form of an aunt who made all important life decisions for her, control that baffled the young Deborah, yet was understandable in the absence of parents, the aunt's qualifications as the principal of the local girls' school, and the need to help the grandparents handle the unexpected gift of raising a grandchild long after their own children had left home. The glaring problem in this aunt-niece relationship was the fact that the aunt never became a parent figure, and the short time little Deborah had lived in her home among her cousins was a miserable experience for the girl. While the aunt didn't seem resentful of the added responsibility, the young Deborah hated the woman's ever-present authority that made no allowance for the girl's wants and individuality.

I had learned in my research that in old Jerusalem, where there was no running water, sanitation or electricity, girls were kept illiterate, which further isolated the already insular Jewish females so they could be married off soon after puberty. In the Satmar community one-hundred years later, though, all girls were educated--albeit in truncated programs that shunned English and offered a stilted religious world view via distorted facts (e.g., the Satmar believe that Jews should not create their own state until the messiah's arrival, and therefore object to Israel's existence.) Luckily for Deborah, there were public libraries available, and when she dared explore the world beyond her street, it was only a few subway stops from Manhattan.

Those freedoms took enormous courage, yet were available within a stone-throw away. If we stop to consider hundreds of million of women living today in Muslim societies that oppress and subjugate them in the name of religion, the hopelessness of their situations is evident as schools, accessible public libraries, piped music at discount clothing stores, subways where women need not be chaperoned by men, and colleges that offer scholarships are simply not available.

Once married at seventeen, Ms. Feldman learned to drive, owned a car, and in time, was able to enroll in college. As horrifically we view the notion of being married off as a teenager to a man she had met only once pre-engagement, and stepping into a marriage that turned out to be doomed by incompatibility, at the beginning the new bride embraced it all. She loved her new status, the adulation she was receiving during the engagement period, and the shower of new clothes, household gifts and furniture when her parsimonious grandfather's purse suddenly opened. Most importantly, marriage offered Deborah the chance to move away with her husband to a suburb where other young Orthodox families breathed a more relaxed atmosphere and Deborah enjoyed the loosening of the community's tight hold on her soul. When she decided to enroll in college, the question of child care of her baby never seems to come up as a problem.

At the end, it seemed that Deborah was never truly religious. She never fully bought into the doctrine and practices embraced by many other Satmars. Eventually, she found her comfort zone in secular Jewish living. This is not a fact her former community seems willing to accept as glimpsed by the vicious attacks on her. It is sad--and expected--that the one who self-expelled from the bonds of fanaticism would be considered a traitor by those who had shown her little compassion when she was living in their midst. There is never room for individual wants or personal freedoms within a fundamentalist religious society that reveres itself exactly for being what it is.

Author Talia Carner's latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, is set in the ultra-Orthodox community of Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman Empire rule of the Holy Land. www.TaliaCarner.com