Sex and tango in Buenos Aires in the late 1800s

THE THIRD DAUGHTER, a new novel

In my new novel I dared enter an arena never explored before....             

              

It took enormous courage for me to write THE THIRD DAUGHTER and to expose a buried, tragic chapter in history in which estimated 200,000 women were deceptively lured from Eastern Europe into prostitution in South America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The whispers of millions of girls and women ensnared into sexual slavery grew into loud cries in my head until I had to give them a voice. It took research, but also maturity, compassion and skill to follow the thread that turned THE THIRD DAUGHTER into a story of courage in the face of danger and hope in the face of despair.

The novel will be released on September 3rd by HarperCollins. (It is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.)

Summary of THE THIRD DAUGHTER:   

       

The turn of the 20th century finds fourteen-year-old Batya in the Russian countryside, fleeing with her family from endless Jewish massacres. Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who can guarantee his daughter an easy life and passage to America. Feeling like a princess in a fairy tale, Batya leaves her old life behind as she is whisked away to a new world. But soon she discovers that she’s entered a waking nightmare. Her new “husband” does indeed bring her to America: Buenos Aires, a vibrant, growing city in which prostitution is not only legal but deeply embedded in the culture. And now Batya is one of thousands of women tricked and sold into a brothel.

As the years pass, Batya forms deep bonds with her “sisters” in the house as well as some men who are both kind and cruel. Through it all, she holds onto one dream: to bring her family to America where they will be safe from the anti-Semitism that plagues Russia. Just as Batya is becoming a known tango dancer, she gets an unexpected but dangerous opportunity—to help bring down the criminal network that has enslaved so many young women yet has been instrumental in developing Buenos Aires into a major metropolis.

This shameful chapter in history is true!   

              

For 70 years, a legal union of traffickers headquartered in Buenos Aires operated with impunity. Zwi Migdal’s members--well-dressed men, speaking Yiddish and flaunting their success--returned to visit their native Eastern European communities on recruitment expeditions. They offered marriages and jobs in the New World, but instead kidnapped these girls and women and forced them into prostitution.

Protected by the Argentine government's laws (as the state budget relied on taxing the brothels,) Zwi Migdal reported at the turn of the 20th century profits of $50 million a year. In some years they employed up to 30,000 women all across South America, (and reaching New York's Lower East Side.)

The inspiration....       

While there is plenty of English-language material about Zwi Migdal (and a lot more in Spanish,) there is hardly any work of fiction since, in 1909, the Yiddish storyteller Sholem Aleichem published a short story, THE MAN FROM BUENOS AIRES. (You may read its translation on my website.)

Interestingly, this story about a shady businessman who brags about his riches but never reveals the nature of his affairs, appeared in the same story collection as the stories about Tevye the dairyman and his daughters, most known in its theatrical adaptation to FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.

My imagination was fired at the question of what would have happened if, after fleeing a pogrom, Tevye’s unmarried daughter met that shady man from Buenos Aires?

Activism          

              

In the coming months, before the novel's release, I will team up with anti-trafficking organizations, local, domestic and international. As I had done with my previous social-issue-centered novels, I will use THE THIRD DAUGHTER as a platform for speaking opportunities and calls for action.

In my book tour, I will inform audiences what they can do about the evil of human slavery in their own backyard. If your organization sponsors a fund-raiser, a literary event, or any form of public stage from which to educate and inspire, I would welcome your invitation. Please contact my event coordinator, Lisa Bernard, at MecoxHudson@gmail.com, or call her at  (203)293-4741 .

I am looking forward to visiting your community.

Read more on my website....              

My website has been updated to include material about THE THIRD DAUGHTER:

* Chapter one 

* Author Q &A 

* The fascinating historical background of the novel 

* Shocking videos about Zwi Migdal and prostitution in Argentina 

* And the above mentioned Sholem Aleichem's story 

 And finally.... 

              

I can't end this blog without mentioning one more inspiration for THE THIRD DAUGHTER--my late mother's painting. My mother, Reviva Yoffe, was a renowned Israeli artist, and this painting, which she had named "The Tango Dancers," revealed to me something profound about these two characters' relationship. When I struggled with doubts as to whether even tackle the subject of bondage, I found encouragement from my late mother....

Thank you for your interest and support. I am looking forward to reconnecting with you in the coming months. Please email me your questions and thoughts.

Talia Carner

www.TaliaCarner.com

  

P.S. Please pre-order THE THIRD DAUGHTER now--in print, digital or audio--and help get the buzz going.

The Debt

             In 1934, at a Maccabiah camp near Warsaw, Rosa, age sixteen, lost her wallet. In it was her car-fare back to her village. Shlomo, an eighteen year old camper, lent her the money.
            Afterward, they corresponded. She wanted to send him the money she owed him, but when he heard about her plans to join a “Gar’ein,” a core group of young people organizing in order to establish a kibbutz in the land promised to the Jews, he suggested instead that she give it to his sister, Sarah, who lived in Palestine.
            Fresh off the boat at the edge of the Mediterranean, Rosa and her comrades settled in the inhospitable land to toil the rocky soil and to dry swamps. They fought mosquitoes and malaria, and eventually deserted their spot and moved to another, then another, until finally they found a home at the foot of Mount Gilboa. There, they built a kibbutz far from the main thoroughfare of the country’s dramatic events.
            In all of that, Rosa forgot all about her debt.
           
            Rosa’s eightieth birthday was celebrated by her family. Rosa’s grandchildren gathered around her and asked her to tell them about her life. They wanted to look at pictures.
            Every bit of her history was stored in an old cardboard suitcase—the same one she had brought from Europe. Or perhaps it wasn’t the same one; Rosa could no longer recall. She hadn’t brought it down from the crawl space in the attic for decades. It didn’t matter. Now, with her grandchildren eager to hear about her life, she opened it.
            She was surprised to find there a sepia-colored photograph of young Shlomo. It had been taken by a professional photographer, and the young Shlomo’s features were distinct.
            “Oh, my God,” she exclaimed. “I forgot to give the money to Sarah!”
            “Sarah who?” asked a granddaughter.
            “Shlomo’s sister.”
            “What’s her last name?”
            Rosa no longer remembered.
            “What’s Shlomo’s?”
            Rosa shrugged. “No problem,” she said. “I’ll call Tel Aviv. It’s a big city. They’ll know.”
            She blocked out her children’s protests that things weren’t done this way.
            The next day, Rosa phoned her niece in Tel Aviv asked her to find Shlomo. He must have made Aliya—immigrated to Israel—because some time in the late 1930s he had told her that he planned to do so.
            “And what did this Shlomo do?” her niece asked.
            “Well, he trained at a Maccabiah camp, so he was athletic. He must have become a gym teacher.”
            “Why don’t you call this school on my street and ask where you can find him?” Rosa’s niece suggested, a bit impatient.
            “I will,” Rosa replied, and called the school.
            The school secretary was sympathetic to the story. “But we are all young here. You are looking for an eighty-two-year-old retired gym teacher. Let me give you the name of an old teacher who used to work here. Maybe she knows him.”
            “Do you know Shlomo, the gym teacher?” Rosa asked to old teacher in her next phone call.
            “Of course. I was at his son’s wedding. But Shlomo died several years ago.”
            How would Rosa repay her debt to a dead man? “What’s his son’s name?” she asked.
            “Yair Haberman. He was my student in third grade, as was his wife.”
            Shlomo hadn’t been Yair’s father, but his father-in-law, Yair explained when she called him.
            “Well, is your wife’s aunt Sarah still alive?” Rosa asked.
           
            In four phone calls she had located the family of he man who had lent her the trip fare in 1934 in a village in Poland, in a country that had been ravaged by war, of people annihilated by savagery.
            Rosa will call Sarah and will send her the equivalent of a car fare from Warsaw to a village that no longer existed. But in her world, in which simple things operate on a simple logic, nothing changed.
           
            (Story told to the author by Yair Haberman.)