In the midst of the Arab awakening, women fighting oppression—in Saudi or any other Muslim nation—is doomed to fade away into a dark night.
Earlier this year, the world watched with bated breath as Egyptian women took to the streets alongside men to protest Mubarak’s rule and demand democracy. Cynically, men encouraged women’s participation—only to betray them once Mubarak was removed. Merely a few months later, Egypt—formerly the more modern among Muslim nations—has regressed into gender apartheid the like of which the country has not been seen in decades, and “modesty squads” roam neighborhoods in search of errant women whose appearance or behavior defy the Extreme Islam’s dictates.
Does anyone believe that Saudi women will fare better in their quest for the right to drive? In 2010, the Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 129th out of 134 countries for gender parity (down from spot #114 in 2006.) Islamic patriarchal system has kept Saudi women not just from driving, but from traveling, working and even signing medical forms without the permission of a male guardian—any male relative, even their own minor child.
Gender apartheid is the basis for the entire Muslim social structure. The Arabic word “fitna” means both civil disorder and beautiful woman. In his 2004 article, “Female Desire and Islamic Trauma,” Islam scholar Daniel Pipes explains:
“The entire Muslim social structure… goes to great lengths to separate the sexes and reduce contact between them. This explains such customs as the covering of women's faces and the separation of women's residential quarters, or the harem. Many other institutions serve to reduce female power over men, such as her need for a male's permission to travel, work, marry, or divorce. Revealingly, a traditional Muslim wedding took place between two men – the groom and the bride's guardian.” The reason, Dr. Pipes explains, is rooted by the view that a woman’s sexual desire is so great, that believers are obsessed with the dangers posed by her presence. “So strong are her [sexual] needs …she represents the forces of unreason and disorder. …She must be contained, for her unbridled sexuality poses a direct danger to the social order.”
For that reason, in 2002, in Saudi Arabia, religious policemen prevented fourteen-year-old schoolgirls from leaving a burning school building because they were not wearing their headscarves and abayahs. Fifteen girls died.
The Quran was written long before automobiles were invented. Therefore, it did not specifically prohibit women from driving. It did not even forbid women from riding horses or camels. And in a society obsessed with the modesty of women’s dress, cars actually hide women better than any other methods of transportation. Saudi Arabia’s leaders’ explanation that women driving is unsafe and leads to sexual impropriety is entirely false, as women are routinely pinched and groped through the chadors when walking in the streets, and are often sexually harassed by taxi drivers—or even raped by their own chauffeurs.
On the other hand, driving women around has created a source of income for many Saudi men: there are hundreds of thousands of chauffeurs in Saudi Arabia. Removing the religious fatwa against women driving would deeply affect an entire profession.
Phyllis Chesler has written extensively that subjugating women is behind the brutal misogynistic Islamic practices such as female genital mutilation, stoning and immolation of women, beatings, forced marriages, child marriages and polygamy. Now that Muslim feminists are taking to the streets in protest for the right to drive, they are beaten by mobs, yet have no legal protection even in cases of barbaric assault or rape. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, commented at FoxNews.com "… [Saudi] women's rights activists have very little [legal] protection for their physical well-being …This is the problem in a corrupt society…. Republics of fear oppress and repress their citizens by allowing criminals to do the dirty work of the government. It allows the government to keep [its] hands free."
Saudi Arabia is the only country that prohibits women from driving. But viewing the protesting women in context of the men’s dread of female power to cause civil disorder, it is clear that breaking any taboo carries the unthinkable threat of women seeking rights for representation in government, in marriage and divorce, or in property ownership.
In the midst of the Arab awakening, women fighting oppression—in Saudi or any other Muslim nation—is doomed to fade away into a dark night, because the power to relinquish control lies in the hands of their oppressors: men, government, and Islamic religious leadership.
# # #
Author Talia Carner’s novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, June 2011) is the story of a woman’s struggle for individuality and freedom within the confines of her society’s strict religious dictates. http://www.taliacarner.com/
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Mothers on Trial, by Phyllis Chesler
Mothers on Trial, by Phyllis Chesler
Reviewed by Talia Carner
Not since slavery in the USA were mothers punished by having their children taken away from them. Yet, in family courts all across America, judges and quasi-judicial officers of the court do just that: children who are abused or molested by their fathers are removed from their primary-care good mothers and are placed in the hands of their molesting fathers.
How this scandal can go on for decades with hardly any change, without any public outcry, and without any protest from human rights’ activists is due to the fact that outsiders to the gutter of our family courts’ justice simply refuse to believe it.
In her revised and updated milestone fact-filled book, “Mothers on Trial,” Phyllis Chesler fights to save thousands of children from becoming yet another generation of victims of a court system that betrays them time and again. She points out that while adult women often recount childhood sexual molestation at home by close relatives—and these women’s stories are believed—people tend to disbelieve when actually facing such cases as they happen in real time, right in front of them.
It is a documented fact that when fathers fight for custody, 70% of the time they obtain full or partial custody. People often assume that the reason these men who, in most part, have not been fully involved in their children’s lives—sometimes have been absent for months or even years—now gain custody is because the mothers are unfit. The naked truth is that in most of these cases, the father is emotionally and verbally abusive or outright violent. The mother, often the product of an abusive home, often abused for years in her marriage to the father of her children, now faces battle for which she is woefully unequipped to wage. Distraught, terrified, isolated, alienated in a system that scrutinizes her with the same critical and belittling attitude she’s encountered in her private lives, panicked over the fate of her sexually molested children, she seems “emotional” “unreasonable” and “difficult.” Her refusal to share parenting or give access to a man who sexually molest her children is viewed as her being “rigid” and “uncooperative.”
Furthermore, with limited or no financial resources, she comes to court either unrepresented by an attorney, or by an incompetent lawyer with little interest in the complexity of such a case. Or, as is often the case, she does not have the funds to keep the protracted legal battle a high-conflict custody case requires. Filing fees, transcripts, payments to evaluators and her lawyer’s hourly rate quickly rise to thousands of dollars.
In the 1990s I stumbled upon the phenomenon of protective mothers losing these battles in drove, researched it for a few years, and finally published a novel about one such fictional mother in 2002. (Puppet Child.) Since then, I became an activist, trying to find ways to save thousands of children each year from family court’s “justice.” What amazes me is how little has changed in the over decade in which I’ve witnessed more mothers enter the nightmare of family court, where they are discredited, disenfranchised and disbelieved.
Dr. Chesler has been at it a lot longer. Twenty-five years ago she published “Mothers on Trial,” a book that starts with the history of men’s ownership of their families and the lingering feudal notion of male supremacy as the head of the household. She pointed then—and continues to do so now in this excellent revised edition—that society and court hold men to much lower parenting standards than they do women. Mothers fail at every single check list (Does the divorced mother have sex? Is she overwrought with anxiety? Is she poor?) while men can be cold, disinterested, dysfunctional or even violent and they will be excused. In fact, fathers are given new chances time and again to foster their relationships with their children regardless of their abhorrent personal histories, while mothers’ contact with their children are not only curtailed or cut down to expensive supervised visitations, but all too often are severed completely.
If a father poisons a child’s mind against the mother, it does not enter into the question of his parenting skills. But all too often, a child’s fear of an abusive father is regarded as the mother’s brainwashing the child, rather than the father’s own doing. A judge will then chastise the mother for not encouraging enough the relationship with the father—and actually transfer custody to that abusive father. The notion of the best interest of the child and how much the child stands to suffer from cutting the bond with the primary caretaking mother while shuttling into a new life with a man the child fears, does not enter into the equation.
A chapter on Fathers’ Supremacist Movement, reports that fathers’ rights groups have also gathered steam in recent decades and have organized themselves in ways that mothers have failed to do. Some leaders in fathers’ groups have a recorded history of battering their wives or girlfriends, or are convicted pedophiles. Others may have a legitimate concern about shared parenting, but have been expressing strong misogynistic opinions. Common to both ends of the spectrum is the way fathers have been presenting themselves: as persecuted victims. They have been receiving media attention and courtroom sympathy with bogus theories (foremost is Parental Alienation Syndrome that is used almost exclusively against mothers,) and have been successful in passing legislation, due in part to Federal funding under the uncritical assumption that children need equal contact with both parents. Mothers do not have access to equal Federal funding.
In this revised edition, after editing out six chapters and adding eight more while updating the available research, Dr. Chesler examines closely many such cases of outright injustice that defy anything people know and believe possible in our society.
Phyllis Chesler’s book is a must read for every judge, court evaluation, guardian ad litem, social worker, psychologist and lawyer. But more importantly, it should be read by anyone who cares about human rights or about children, because it is time we raise our collective indignation to stop and reverse the life sentence without parole our courts inflict upon children placed in the hands of their molesters.
(To order the book, please click: Mothers On Trial )
# # #
Author Talia Carner’s novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, June 2011) is the story of a woman’s struggle for individuality and freedom within the confines of her society’s strict religious dictates. http://www.taliacarner.com/
Monday, June 6, 2011
My personal feminism--and JERUSALEM MAIDEN
I was recently asked about the roots of my feminism--and my newly released novel's relevance to today's women. Here are my responses:
1) Over the span of your professional life, you have held several influential positions related to women's issues, rights and activism. At what point in your career did you begin to formulate thoughts that would be later used to craft the story of JERUSALEM MAIDEN?
While stories find me in “Eureka!” moments, their seeds have often been planted in me long before, creating the fertile soil for the blooming of a novel. This is certainly the case with JERUSALEM MAIDEN. I come from a family with a strong maternal line of talented, capable, ground-breaking females. I heard stories about my great-great-grandmother who traveled from Jerusalem to Russia at age fourteen to get Halitza (a form of Jewish release from marriage), and about my great-grandmother who was so intelligent that her father, a rabbi, allowed her to sit outside the door to his yeshiva (Jewish religious school) and listen. As an adolescent, I already had a sense that my grandmother Esther was a superb artist who did not belong in her world and who was bitter about being kneaded into a mold that she hated. Her oldest daughter actually ran away from home in the early 1940s to study law in Beirut (under the British Mandate). My grandmother’s youngest daughter manipulated her way to New York where she eventually became the first woman stock broker at Dean Witter Reynolds, then third largest US brokerage firms. My own mother, now a successful Israeli artist who’s sold literally thousands of paintings in her career only began painting at age forty. In my nascent feminism of the early 70s which I developed independently from the lexicon and ideas that had already entered US culture, I ached for the tremendous waste I sensed in the previous generations. It took the penning of three novels and the premature death of a talented cousin with whom I had discussed our grandmother many times for me to finally begin to tackle this big subject that was both personal and global.
2) In JERUSALEM MAIDEN you introduce readers to a young woman in early 20th-century Jerusalem who struggles with her traditional faith as her personal desires pull her away from home. Is there a message for today's women in Esther's journey? What about women in non-Western style societies?
Esther's story is still universal. Having lived and traveled abroad, and having worked with women in Third-World nations, I learned to appreciate our freedoms and opportunities. Yet, even in the 21st century, all too many women in Western societies are bound by self-imposed social, religious or psychological constraints lodged in their heads, constraints that hold them back no less than did Esther’s God—or the rabbis’ interpretations of His will.
This is not the case with women living in non-Western societies. Whether in China or Congo, Argentina or Saudi Arabia, women do not have the access to education, health care, economic resources, birth control, political power or civil liberties that would make it possible for them to even envision—let alone accomplish—independence and personal fulfillment. Also, not mutually exclusive is the fact that around the globe poverty is feminized, which immensely affects priorities. The key to change, of course, is education—of women, but also of men and governments, for development can be accelerated when women share the resources, gain confidence, and contribute to the betterment of society.
1) Over the span of your professional life, you have held several influential positions related to women's issues, rights and activism. At what point in your career did you begin to formulate thoughts that would be later used to craft the story of JERUSALEM MAIDEN?
While stories find me in “Eureka!” moments, their seeds have often been planted in me long before, creating the fertile soil for the blooming of a novel. This is certainly the case with JERUSALEM MAIDEN. I come from a family with a strong maternal line of talented, capable, ground-breaking females. I heard stories about my great-great-grandmother who traveled from Jerusalem to Russia at age fourteen to get Halitza (a form of Jewish release from marriage), and about my great-grandmother who was so intelligent that her father, a rabbi, allowed her to sit outside the door to his yeshiva (Jewish religious school) and listen. As an adolescent, I already had a sense that my grandmother Esther was a superb artist who did not belong in her world and who was bitter about being kneaded into a mold that she hated. Her oldest daughter actually ran away from home in the early 1940s to study law in Beirut (under the British Mandate). My grandmother’s youngest daughter manipulated her way to New York where she eventually became the first woman stock broker at Dean Witter Reynolds, then third largest US brokerage firms. My own mother, now a successful Israeli artist who’s sold literally thousands of paintings in her career only began painting at age forty. In my nascent feminism of the early 70s which I developed independently from the lexicon and ideas that had already entered US culture, I ached for the tremendous waste I sensed in the previous generations. It took the penning of three novels and the premature death of a talented cousin with whom I had discussed our grandmother many times for me to finally begin to tackle this big subject that was both personal and global.
2) In JERUSALEM MAIDEN you introduce readers to a young woman in early 20th-century Jerusalem who struggles with her traditional faith as her personal desires pull her away from home. Is there a message for today's women in Esther's journey? What about women in non-Western style societies?
Esther's story is still universal. Having lived and traveled abroad, and having worked with women in Third-World nations, I learned to appreciate our freedoms and opportunities. Yet, even in the 21st century, all too many women in Western societies are bound by self-imposed social, religious or psychological constraints lodged in their heads, constraints that hold them back no less than did Esther’s God—or the rabbis’ interpretations of His will.
This is not the case with women living in non-Western societies. Whether in China or Congo, Argentina or Saudi Arabia, women do not have the access to education, health care, economic resources, birth control, political power or civil liberties that would make it possible for them to even envision—let alone accomplish—independence and personal fulfillment. Also, not mutually exclusive is the fact that around the globe poverty is feminized, which immensely affects priorities. The key to change, of course, is education—of women, but also of men and governments, for development can be accelerated when women share the resources, gain confidence, and contribute to the betterment of society.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Truth is a must in fiction
Real life happens, and, paradoxically, that is what fiction is about.
Back in the stone-age days of the early 80s, I worked for Redbook magazine, which taught young married women how to manage the physicality of home, family, kitchen, marriage, and children. The editorial content supposedly reflected the nuances of women’s lives and covered relationship topics such as friendships or loss of loved ones. Sometimes their articles even touched job-loss or difficult in-laws, but “problems” were usually sugar-coated and often had the unreal feel of Hallmark Cards.
In 1985 I moved to Savvy Woman magazine as its publisher. Savvy was the magazine for the women executives—a new phenomenon for those females “allowed” to play with the big boys in their sandbox.
Common to both types of magazines was the fact that none recognized the anguish of women who had failed to find a mate, or had coupled with the wrong man in a marriage that was ending in divorce. Nor was the word “custody” ever mentioned. Whether a homemaker or a CEO of a public company, there was an assumption of happiness within the context of a husband and children.
I always worked in the business side of magazines, never the editorial. But I asked questions. Redbook editors had told me that it would be “a kiss of death” for a magazine to touch the topic of divorce, let alone abuse, court, or lawyers. And in Savvy Woman magazine, we published a study proving how sexually satisfied executive women were in spite of their busy lives. Only a few of years ago, the then-Editor-in-Chief (and still my friend), Wendy Reid Crisp, described the fraudulent way in which this study had been obtained—and how she had been pressured by the magazine’s management to publish it. Executive women were shattering the glass ceiling with their heads. The truth was that they were lonely, unhappy, and had little sex.
We trusted magazines. Women’s magazines were our friends, our companions. I loved their feel, their fresh smell of ink that even perfume samples failed to ruin. It was disappointing to read the blasting indictment by Myrna Blyth, the former Editor-in-Chief of Ladies’ Home Journal for over 20 years, of women’s magazines and their exploitation of women’s insecurities and dreams….
In the 1990s, I left the business world to become a full-time fiction writer. I had always been an avid reader of novels—a slow reader, I must say, as I mouthed the music of sentences and heard in my head the rhythm of paragraphs, waiting for that wonderful concert of senses in the form of a story that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, sometimes for year!
Novels capture you in quite the opposite way than magazines do. Rather than seeking information and “how-to” guidance, you approach a novel for the entertainment value, for the intellectual stimulation. You know it is fiction, it is not real, and you hope it would give you an emotional thrill. A good story is artistically woven with universal emotions under the pressure-cooker of seemingly real-life crises, and it carries you into this fictional world with all its trials and tribulations. Suddenly you care. At the end, you are inspired and encouraged, because when you embark upon a journey with the protagonist, you ride along the twists-and-turns in a condensed real-life manner, and you discover or redefine truths along with her.
Truth is a must in fiction. Only the characters and personal events relating to the protagonist are fictionalized. The emotions must be real. The way information is being doled out must be sincere.
And if divorce or death, or betrayal, or misery, or custody battle, or social injustice happen in fiction, it is because real life is filled with roads of no returns. As Nola, the protagonist of one of my novels, CHINA DOLL, discovered: the most common denominator of people are the emotions of separations and losses.
And that emotional truth is the basis of a good novel.
Author Talia Carner's new novel is JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, June 2011.) It depicts the struggle of a young woman between her passion for art and her society's religious dictates. Please check www.TaliaCarner.com .
Back in the stone-age days of the early 80s, I worked for Redbook magazine, which taught young married women how to manage the physicality of home, family, kitchen, marriage, and children. The editorial content supposedly reflected the nuances of women’s lives and covered relationship topics such as friendships or loss of loved ones. Sometimes their articles even touched job-loss or difficult in-laws, but “problems” were usually sugar-coated and often had the unreal feel of Hallmark Cards.
In 1985 I moved to Savvy Woman magazine as its publisher. Savvy was the magazine for the women executives—a new phenomenon for those females “allowed” to play with the big boys in their sandbox.
Common to both types of magazines was the fact that none recognized the anguish of women who had failed to find a mate, or had coupled with the wrong man in a marriage that was ending in divorce. Nor was the word “custody” ever mentioned. Whether a homemaker or a CEO of a public company, there was an assumption of happiness within the context of a husband and children.
I always worked in the business side of magazines, never the editorial. But I asked questions. Redbook editors had told me that it would be “a kiss of death” for a magazine to touch the topic of divorce, let alone abuse, court, or lawyers. And in Savvy Woman magazine, we published a study proving how sexually satisfied executive women were in spite of their busy lives. Only a few of years ago, the then-Editor-in-Chief (and still my friend), Wendy Reid Crisp, described the fraudulent way in which this study had been obtained—and how she had been pressured by the magazine’s management to publish it. Executive women were shattering the glass ceiling with their heads. The truth was that they were lonely, unhappy, and had little sex.
We trusted magazines. Women’s magazines were our friends, our companions. I loved their feel, their fresh smell of ink that even perfume samples failed to ruin. It was disappointing to read the blasting indictment by Myrna Blyth, the former Editor-in-Chief of Ladies’ Home Journal for over 20 years, of women’s magazines and their exploitation of women’s insecurities and dreams….
In the 1990s, I left the business world to become a full-time fiction writer. I had always been an avid reader of novels—a slow reader, I must say, as I mouthed the music of sentences and heard in my head the rhythm of paragraphs, waiting for that wonderful concert of senses in the form of a story that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, sometimes for year!
Novels capture you in quite the opposite way than magazines do. Rather than seeking information and “how-to” guidance, you approach a novel for the entertainment value, for the intellectual stimulation. You know it is fiction, it is not real, and you hope it would give you an emotional thrill. A good story is artistically woven with universal emotions under the pressure-cooker of seemingly real-life crises, and it carries you into this fictional world with all its trials and tribulations. Suddenly you care. At the end, you are inspired and encouraged, because when you embark upon a journey with the protagonist, you ride along the twists-and-turns in a condensed real-life manner, and you discover or redefine truths along with her.
Truth is a must in fiction. Only the characters and personal events relating to the protagonist are fictionalized. The emotions must be real. The way information is being doled out must be sincere.
And if divorce or death, or betrayal, or misery, or custody battle, or social injustice happen in fiction, it is because real life is filled with roads of no returns. As Nola, the protagonist of one of my novels, CHINA DOLL, discovered: the most common denominator of people are the emotions of separations and losses.
And that emotional truth is the basis of a good novel.
# # #
Author Talia Carner's new novel is JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, June 2011.) It depicts the struggle of a young woman between her passion for art and her society's religious dictates. Please check www.TaliaCarner.com .
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Saving Rivka
Rivka was fourteen. A Jerusalem maiden, she was already married, building a home in God's Holy City according to the mitzvah to hasten the messiah’s arrival.
Alas, Rivka's young husband died, leaving her no longer a virgin but neither a mother. She was doomed to never contribute her share to hastening the messiah’s arrival through the good dead of procreation in Jerusalem.
Thankfully, to her rescue came the ancient law that would ensure saving her womb from this fate, a law that would help her bear children in her husband’s name.
No frozen sperms in a bank. Familiar only with the old-fashion route, the law simply required that Rivka's husband’s brother would impregnate her on his dead brother’s behalf, thus ensuring the closest proxy of the dead man’s seed. “Yibum,” the rabbis called this brilliant scheme, as thus saved, Rivka would not be deprived of the privilege to hasten the messiah’s arrival.
But wait! There were problems: Rivka's brother-in-law was merely a boy of eight, and he lived in Russia, Yishmor Hashem.
Poor Rivka was condemned to a lifelong widowhood, except that another Jewish law, a more modern one, came to her rescue. This law demonstrated the sages’ enlightenment by undoing the archaic law of Yibum. According to this more progressive law, called Halitza, the deceased man’s brother may relinquish his sacred obligation to his brother’s memory—but not without a great shame.
Disdained at her brother-in-law’s refusal to impregnate her, Rivka must humiliate him publicly by removing one of his shoes and spitting in his face.
Armed with this practical solution to her plight, at age fourteen Rivka set out alone on the road to Russia, on foot and on horseback, through snow-capped mountains crawling with bandits.
It took her two years to make the trip there, and two more years to return to Jerusalem, a free woman.
The messiah, who’s forever tarried, waited until at age eighteen Rivka was finally permitted to remarry and fulfill her duty to hasten his arrival.
Rivka was my grandmother’s grandmother, the grandmother of Esther, my own grandmother who inspired the protagonist in my upcoming novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN. The novel fictionalizes an alternate life for a woman wishing to break away from the religious confinements of her society in order to fulfill her passion for art.
My grandmother passed on to me Rivka’s determination and courage. But I also took another lesson: I stopped worrying about the messiah’s comings and goings. Then, no longer burdened with carrying the weight of the world’s fate on my shoulders, I’ve become my own messiah.
# # #
Talia Carner’s next heart-wrenching novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, will be published by HarperCollins on May 31st, 2011. It is the story of a woman’s struggle for individuality against her society’s religious dictates. http://www.taliacarner.com/
Alas, Rivka's young husband died, leaving her no longer a virgin but neither a mother. She was doomed to never contribute her share to hastening the messiah’s arrival through the good dead of procreation in Jerusalem.
Thankfully, to her rescue came the ancient law that would ensure saving her womb from this fate, a law that would help her bear children in her husband’s name.
No frozen sperms in a bank. Familiar only with the old-fashion route, the law simply required that Rivka's husband’s brother would impregnate her on his dead brother’s behalf, thus ensuring the closest proxy of the dead man’s seed. “Yibum,” the rabbis called this brilliant scheme, as thus saved, Rivka would not be deprived of the privilege to hasten the messiah’s arrival.
But wait! There were problems: Rivka's brother-in-law was merely a boy of eight, and he lived in Russia, Yishmor Hashem.
Poor Rivka was condemned to a lifelong widowhood, except that another Jewish law, a more modern one, came to her rescue. This law demonstrated the sages’ enlightenment by undoing the archaic law of Yibum. According to this more progressive law, called Halitza, the deceased man’s brother may relinquish his sacred obligation to his brother’s memory—but not without a great shame.
Disdained at her brother-in-law’s refusal to impregnate her, Rivka must humiliate him publicly by removing one of his shoes and spitting in his face.
Armed with this practical solution to her plight, at age fourteen Rivka set out alone on the road to Russia, on foot and on horseback, through snow-capped mountains crawling with bandits.
It took her two years to make the trip there, and two more years to return to Jerusalem, a free woman.
The messiah, who’s forever tarried, waited until at age eighteen Rivka was finally permitted to remarry and fulfill her duty to hasten his arrival.
Rivka was my grandmother’s grandmother, the grandmother of Esther, my own grandmother who inspired the protagonist in my upcoming novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN. The novel fictionalizes an alternate life for a woman wishing to break away from the religious confinements of her society in order to fulfill her passion for art.
My grandmother passed on to me Rivka’s determination and courage. But I also took another lesson: I stopped worrying about the messiah’s comings and goings. Then, no longer burdened with carrying the weight of the world’s fate on my shoulders, I’ve become my own messiah.
# # #
Talia Carner’s next heart-wrenching novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, will be published by HarperCollins on May 31st, 2011. It is the story of a woman’s struggle for individuality against her society’s religious dictates. http://www.taliacarner.com/
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Shall I ever write a negative book review?
Benjamin D’Israeli said, “When I want to read a good book, I write one.” But even D’Israeli, I am sure, also read books written by others—and enjoyed them.
As an author, I am often asked for recommendations of books I’ve read and enjoyed. I am also asked to read works-in-progress. Unfortunately, I do more of the latter than the former, but I enjoy both processes.
Reviewing published books is different from reviewing unpublished manuscripts. When I review a writing buddy's work-in-progress (or even when she believes it is all done,) I can offer constructive suggestions which she may or may not follow, but there is still time for corrections before the manuscript gets into the hands of an agent, publisher--and finally a reader. The critiquing—a constructive process that is not criticizing—is challenging as I am inserting myself into the creative thinking of the development of characterization and plot, or the use of language and voice. I can advise about setting and pace, or dialogue vs. exposition.
In reviewing published books, my perspective is different: It is too late to change the book, while my readers look to me for recommendations of books I appreciate. They've enjoyed reading mine and hope to have that emotional high we all get when we are carried away by a great read. Therefore, I must offer them my honest opinion.
That said, I rarely read anything I don't like. Why should I? I drop the book after 2-50 pages and therefore would not write a review. However, there have been times when I was coaxed into reading on in the context of a book group or was pressed by a friend to read a particular bestseller. In one case, my original reluctance proved wrong as the book improved greatly. In other cases though, I gained enough familiarity with the work to explain what I perceived to be objective flaws. In these cases, each of the authors was extremely successful, so my less-than-top starry review could not adversely affect his career.
That leaves a gray area in between: When I am asked to review a published book of an unknown author. If the book has problems, I may just find an excuse not to write a review. Recently, after reading 50 pages, I wrote back to the publicist and explained the reasons I would not endorse the book, but I volunteered to read the author’s next manuscript in order to help her avoid some serious lapses.
In one case, an author I knew failed to get enough reviews. I read the whole book, found it wanting, but nevertheless was pressured to give it 5 stars. For a few weeks I flinched each time I thought about my false endorsement. Finally, I went back and changed my rating to 4 stars, but was still unhappy because I had not express in writing where the book fell short. After some time, I just deleted the review and promised myself I would not go this route again.
And then there is the real pleasure, when I read a book that is great. What a wonderful honor it is to be the one to "discover" that author! And that’s also when I enjoy sharing my finds with other book lovers.
Here is the link to my Amazon Listmanias:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/byauthor/A3QG0CPUBT30WH/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_athr?ie=UTF8&lm_bb=
And here is the link to my book reviews (I am backed up, but will add more soon):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3QG0CPUBT30WH/ref=cm_rp_lm_list_profile
Have a good reading experience!
Talia
As an author, I am often asked for recommendations of books I’ve read and enjoyed. I am also asked to read works-in-progress. Unfortunately, I do more of the latter than the former, but I enjoy both processes.
Reviewing published books is different from reviewing unpublished manuscripts. When I review a writing buddy's work-in-progress (or even when she believes it is all done,) I can offer constructive suggestions which she may or may not follow, but there is still time for corrections before the manuscript gets into the hands of an agent, publisher--and finally a reader. The critiquing—a constructive process that is not criticizing—is challenging as I am inserting myself into the creative thinking of the development of characterization and plot, or the use of language and voice. I can advise about setting and pace, or dialogue vs. exposition.
In reviewing published books, my perspective is different: It is too late to change the book, while my readers look to me for recommendations of books I appreciate. They've enjoyed reading mine and hope to have that emotional high we all get when we are carried away by a great read. Therefore, I must offer them my honest opinion.
That said, I rarely read anything I don't like. Why should I? I drop the book after 2-50 pages and therefore would not write a review. However, there have been times when I was coaxed into reading on in the context of a book group or was pressed by a friend to read a particular bestseller. In one case, my original reluctance proved wrong as the book improved greatly. In other cases though, I gained enough familiarity with the work to explain what I perceived to be objective flaws. In these cases, each of the authors was extremely successful, so my less-than-top starry review could not adversely affect his career.
That leaves a gray area in between: When I am asked to review a published book of an unknown author. If the book has problems, I may just find an excuse not to write a review. Recently, after reading 50 pages, I wrote back to the publicist and explained the reasons I would not endorse the book, but I volunteered to read the author’s next manuscript in order to help her avoid some serious lapses.
In one case, an author I knew failed to get enough reviews. I read the whole book, found it wanting, but nevertheless was pressured to give it 5 stars. For a few weeks I flinched each time I thought about my false endorsement. Finally, I went back and changed my rating to 4 stars, but was still unhappy because I had not express in writing where the book fell short. After some time, I just deleted the review and promised myself I would not go this route again.
And then there is the real pleasure, when I read a book that is great. What a wonderful honor it is to be the one to "discover" that author! And that’s also when I enjoy sharing my finds with other book lovers.
Here is the link to my Amazon Listmanias:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/byauthor/A3QG0CPUBT30WH/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_athr?ie=UTF8&lm_bb=
And here is the link to my book reviews (I am backed up, but will add more soon):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3QG0CPUBT30WH/ref=cm_rp_lm_list_profile
Have a good reading experience!
Talia
Monday, April 11, 2011
Public Thoughts To be Read At The Passover Table
Passover 2011
By Talia Carner
This Passover, as we celebrate our ancestors’ freedom from slavery, we reconnect through our most important holiday with our centuries-long traditions. It is incumbent upon us to contemplate the broader concept of freedom and what it means to us as individuals, as members of our immediate communities, and as members of the community of Jews across the globe.
Throughout history, Passover has also been a time of increased blood libels and pogroms against Jews. While Jews celebrated freedom and showed benevolence toward fellow humans, they were reminded how hated they were—hatred so strong that “justified” killing them by the dozens, thousands, and millions. In these days, as a new wave of anti-Semitism is sweeping over the globe, gathering tsunami-like power, it lands right in Manhattan's UN building. The global Jew-hate fest from Venezuela to Spain has metastasized into leading universities, mainstream media, civic organizations, and even Western governments. The tale of the Haggadah we read at the Seder stands to remind us that hate comes knocking on our door first with words, then with economic and academic boycotts, then with biased UN resolutions, and, as in the past, it may end with guns, bombs and incinerators.
Passover also marks spring in our ancient agrarian society, a beginning of a cycle of life, with the blooming of trees and the planting of vegetables and flowers. Spring’s fresh start and the tradition of inviting strangers to share our bounty at the Passover table reminds us of Israel’s extraordinary achievements in agriculture and science—efficiencies, discoveries and inventions she has sharedfor decades with over 120 countries to help nourish children, improve global food production, and wipe out starvation.
While these past sixty-three years Israelis—both civilians and soldiers—have given each Jew everywhere reason to walk tall and proud, their existential threat from Iran is real.
“Every Jew should consider himself as if he was freed from slavery,” says the Haggadah we read tonight. In today’s climate we should add that “Every Jew should consider himself as if he’s just escaped a terrorist bomb.” There but for the grace of God and twist of history, we would not have been spared the wrath and bombs of Palestinians or extreme Muslim murderers taking shelter in our sacred freedom. Let’s give our prayers and charity to the families who have suffered unimaginable, senseless losses and to the over 6,000 injured Israelis forever coping with imbedded nails, burned faces, or missing limbs. And as we do, let us search within ourselves whether we have done all we could for them and for the Israeli soldiers who take the first bullet for us.
The tradition of Passover also calls us to invite to the Seder table any Jew who does not have one. Let’s invite—at least in our thoughts—all our Jewish brethren in countries that do not offer the freedom and protection that the USA guarantees us. For them, we can raise our collective voice with indignation and outrage and use our collective power to fight tyranny and fanaticism that calls for our—and their—demise.
At a recent interview, Israel’s president Shimon Peres said that even Ben-Gurion had not dreamed big enough. Let us dream big tonight—stretch our dream to encompass all the vast possibilities, and let us dream tonight of a world of peace.
Let us bless all the good things God has given us so far, and celebrate our resilience and our heritage of strong Jewish values that we have shared with the world over for centuries. And let's allow that dream bring joy to our hearts and to our Passover table.
Amen.
Novelist Talia Carner lives in New York. Her next novel, Jerusalem Maiden, will be published in June 2011 by HarperCollins. (www.TaliaCarner.com)
By Talia Carner
This Passover, as we celebrate our ancestors’ freedom from slavery, we reconnect through our most important holiday with our centuries-long traditions. It is incumbent upon us to contemplate the broader concept of freedom and what it means to us as individuals, as members of our immediate communities, and as members of the community of Jews across the globe.
Throughout history, Passover has also been a time of increased blood libels and pogroms against Jews. While Jews celebrated freedom and showed benevolence toward fellow humans, they were reminded how hated they were—hatred so strong that “justified” killing them by the dozens, thousands, and millions. In these days, as a new wave of anti-Semitism is sweeping over the globe, gathering tsunami-like power, it lands right in Manhattan's UN building. The global Jew-hate fest from Venezuela to Spain has metastasized into leading universities, mainstream media, civic organizations, and even Western governments. The tale of the Haggadah we read at the Seder stands to remind us that hate comes knocking on our door first with words, then with economic and academic boycotts, then with biased UN resolutions, and, as in the past, it may end with guns, bombs and incinerators.
Passover also marks spring in our ancient agrarian society, a beginning of a cycle of life, with the blooming of trees and the planting of vegetables and flowers. Spring’s fresh start and the tradition of inviting strangers to share our bounty at the Passover table reminds us of Israel’s extraordinary achievements in agriculture and science—efficiencies, discoveries and inventions she has sharedfor decades with over 120 countries to help nourish children, improve global food production, and wipe out starvation.
While these past sixty-three years Israelis—both civilians and soldiers—have given each Jew everywhere reason to walk tall and proud, their existential threat from Iran is real.
“Every Jew should consider himself as if he was freed from slavery,” says the Haggadah we read tonight. In today’s climate we should add that “Every Jew should consider himself as if he’s just escaped a terrorist bomb.” There but for the grace of God and twist of history, we would not have been spared the wrath and bombs of Palestinians or extreme Muslim murderers taking shelter in our sacred freedom. Let’s give our prayers and charity to the families who have suffered unimaginable, senseless losses and to the over 6,000 injured Israelis forever coping with imbedded nails, burned faces, or missing limbs. And as we do, let us search within ourselves whether we have done all we could for them and for the Israeli soldiers who take the first bullet for us.
The tradition of Passover also calls us to invite to the Seder table any Jew who does not have one. Let’s invite—at least in our thoughts—all our Jewish brethren in countries that do not offer the freedom and protection that the USA guarantees us. For them, we can raise our collective voice with indignation and outrage and use our collective power to fight tyranny and fanaticism that calls for our—and their—demise.
At a recent interview, Israel’s president Shimon Peres said that even Ben-Gurion had not dreamed big enough. Let us dream big tonight—stretch our dream to encompass all the vast possibilities, and let us dream tonight of a world of peace.
Let us bless all the good things God has given us so far, and celebrate our resilience and our heritage of strong Jewish values that we have shared with the world over for centuries. And let's allow that dream bring joy to our hearts and to our Passover table.
Amen.
Novelist Talia Carner lives in New York. Her next novel, Jerusalem Maiden, will be published in June 2011 by HarperCollins. (www.TaliaCarner.com)
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