Zibby interviews author Talia Carner about THE BOY WITH THE STAR TATTOO, a spellbinding and impeccably researched historical novel of ingenuity and courage, love and loss, spanning postwar France when Israeli agents roamed the countryside to rescue hidden Jewish orphans—to the 1969 escape of the Israeli naval boats of Cherbourg, France. Talia describes her writing process and inspiration for this novel, including a French road sign and interviews with Israeli Navy officers. She also talks about the antisemitic attacks on her work, her focus on moral dilemmas, and the support she’s received from the Jewish community amid these challenges.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Talia. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Boy with the Star Tattoo.

Talia: Thank you so much for having me on your program. 

Zibby: Your book has gotten so much attention, not only for positive reasons, but as a target. The content is so good. You're a great writer. The story is so important, especially now. Tell listeners both about what the First, what the story is about, and then I want to talk about sort of your, the launch of this book into the crazy world in which we live right now.

Talia: Yeah. The, um, very brief description is that the assistant of an Israeli naval officer stationed in Cherbourg, France in late 1968, is obsessed in trying to figure out what happened to in his life to have brought him from at the edge of fall from a quaint French village. As a child orphan to Israel through euthelia, and now he is an Israeli officer.

What happened? Who were the parents? And there is one big clue, and that is he has a star tattoo at the bottom of his foot. And she follows a breadcrumb of ends throughout France. And in the process, we get to see two particular themes of the novel. One is Euthylia, which is the rescue of Jewish orphans post World War II.

And bringing them to then Palestine. And the second one, a very amazing event, 1969, escape of the boats of Shabu, when the Israeli Navy stole its own boats that were held back by the French embargo. That would be the background of the book, through which, like the framework in which the rest of the story takes place.

Zibby: Wow. Well, the way you set it up and the immediacy with which you write, you feel like you're there and you bring us along the way as we, in our heads, we connect some of the dots, which is always very exciting. I'm like, is this, this is this person, this person, you know, like the reader has to be engaged in the discovery of all of it as well and, you know, you feel some of these horrors and some of these joys and relief and then devastation and all of the emotions wrapped up in that time of life. And I guess life in general, but particularly that time, tell me about how you got some of that context to make it so real, the details, all of that.

Talia: It started with a. Passing comment. Well, it started with a road sign. When I saw my husband and I were driving in Normandy, France, and I saw the sign to show Borg and we didn't go in but as we drove on, on, we, I realized I knew something very important that that happened and that is this incredible event that was the biggest event most public execution of ingenuity on behalf of the IDF, which the Navy is part of the IDF, in Israel, all of the, all the parts, the air, air, ground and sea and intelligence are part of the IDF.

So, but only five years later, there was another event with, that overshadowed it called the Entebbe Raid. But back to this, I remember that, and I read after that passing, I read about it, almost forgot it, and then I mentioned in passing in a visit to Israel, to an Israeli journalist, that one day I was going to look into it.

I was writing at that time, my previous novel, The Third Daughter. A few hours later, she calls me and says, Admiral Hadar Kimri is waiting for your call. And I was flabbergasted because I didn't even know he was alive. I now knew the name just because I'd read about it relatively recently and I called him.

He was 89 years old. Now he's 95, and he immediately said, hop on the train. I was in Tel Aviv, come to Haifa, and I'll meet you there. I developed into a lovely relationship. I've met him several times subsequently and he then opened his flip phone and gave me the contacts for 14 other people who are alive and coherent.

So I felt that, okay, I didn't have time for them, but everyone of this list who was between the age of 89 and 98, and I had to tell him, wait a couple of years until I have time for you. And that was not practical. So I interviewed them, find myself by the end of the summer, that's, it's 1917, I decided to go to Cherbourg, but I had a problem, and that is, I don't write naval warfare.

I write about social issues and moral dilemmas. I write about the human angst. So, I had one thing I trusted myself, that when I walk those cobblestone alleys the story would come to me, and sure enough, that's what happened. By the third day, Sharon showed up. Sharon, I know her. She was, she had had a cameo appearance in the epilogue of my novel, Jerusalem Maiden, that had been published several years prior.

But I know her very well, and she happened to be in 1969, It's like 1968 is where we started with a project and she's in Paris and she's 20 years old. She's right out of the idea of what she served in as an intelligence analyst. She was perfect and I know her family and she led me to that second thread because her mother had been an orphan that had been rescued by Euphalia and it's a story I always wanted to tell.

So that was already built in into that epilogue of several years prior. The readers do not need to read both books in order, they're not connected, and they may have fun reading Jerusalem Maiden, but then that it's not necessary, but from that point on, I had my protagonist and the theme of Yuthaliya that was going to take me through and of course her personality.

She already shows it, uh, in that epilogue in the previous book. 

Zibby: Wow. So when you're meeting all of the, that's extraordinary by the way, that your pads got to cross with and get all this primary research. So when you're doing that, how, like, how do you get the most out of all the men to find out all the stories?

What do you do? You sit with them for hours or like paint a picture for me of how you do it. 

Talia: Once I have those contacts, I interviewed them and mostly by, by phone on FaceTime, cause I did it over a period of time, but also another, so, and then I went on the internet because these were all officers or I had the children of the officers who had been children at the time they came with their fathers and the mothers were there. The family has arrived and settled in Schauburg. Now they were in the mid to late 60s. But they told me there were different things very important that they told me with fantastic information like about Felix Samiot or one kid who had I went to first grade and he gave, they gave him a little, literally a slate with a chalk.

This is how they taught children to write at that time, not with a pen and pencil. I would never have received that information, but Felix Amiot is a character. We don't have much time to talk about it now, but anybody who has ever read the, the biography of Coco Chanel, he appears, he's the guy who outfoxed Coco Chanel when she tried to steal the part of her Jewish partners during World War II, the Wertheimers, and they fled, and she thought, oh, okay, now I'm gonna get it to find out that they sold it to Felix Samiot. We meet him 25 years later there are a lot of moral dilemmas that are involved with this character that I got to absolutely love from people who had, who knew him personally. There was another, another two, two threads to my research, which were fantastic coincidence one, I was not going to go into the French side, because I'm not an investigative journalist, and I had enough material to tell from, from the Israeli side. But I watched videos and so on, and when I wasn't sure book, I could not go into that shipyard because in the 47 years since it had been converted into a nuclear submarine manufacturer, and I couldn't just knock on the door of the century and say, may I just look around here in the nuclear submarine factory.

But, lo and behold, somebody made a connection, said, why don't you contact the CEO of so and so, and I, oh my God, I contacted him, invited me to visit, and he gave me other contacts that I was looking for, a particular journalist that I've been looking for for a year and a half. Who had at the time it was nine old men covered the events.

I don't know if it's too much information, but it was what's going on from one thing to another to another. And, um, so that French journalist, I was on the phone with him and in French because I do speak. I went to a French high school in Israel, but so he's talking to me. So I changed it. My husband was with me.

I put it on a speaker and switch to English because my name was on was educated in Oxford. So my husband was here in a conversation. He says, tell him you'll come in the spring. So I said, I'm coming in the spring. I made five friends. So he invited us for, to his House in the French Alps. It was at that time about 84 85.

So it wasn't any God gave me incredible information. And so I have I had more information than I needed and again, I wanted to focus on a human drama and a personal story. The other thing that as the story involved, it went into into the Loire Valley and I did not know the Loire Valley. And now it's COVID, and I can't travel there.

So I had maps on the floor of my office. We're sitting here in this nest that I have on on top of the house and I call it my pigeon nest. And, um, I, I was on the phone on a Zoom with the, uh, historians and tour guides, and I had to be specifically around a particular chateau, Chateau de Var en Cey, that had a very interesting um, history related to something to the German invasion.

I'm not going to go again. 

Zibby: Okay. Yeah. 

Talia: But I helped, I looked in with their help at the various villages and ended up selecting them by using drones. So, I hovered with drones over those villages. I needed to know, um, where's the church and where's the river and where's the marketplace and, and make. 

Zibby: This is the inside, inside look into how to write historical fiction, right?

This is how you do it. 

Talia: And then by October 20, 2021, I was finally able to drive, to go there. That was my fifth trip. And I found on the ground that one particular town that I, my story was involved, was not appropriate, it didn't work out as I had thought from the air. I also had the opportunity to attend a conference of Huguenots, who, they're Protestants living in the Loire Valley who saved Jews.

And they happened to have a conference on the agenda on the uh, the Gentiles who, you know, uh, who saved Jews and Yad Vashem has, has this category and they were discussing that and I'm sitting there like a fly on the wall on Zoom listening to their discussion and learning so much about how they saved Jews during the Holocaust.

We didn't, I didn't use it other than, because my book is not about a Holocaust, it's what happened after because one major question I had was, how do you discover, find Jewish orphans? An agent. Go from farmhouse to farmhouse and knocked on the door and he said, Do you happen to have a Jewish kid here?

Let me take her across the Mediterranean to a country whose language she doesn't speak and the people who've raised her now for four years said, sure, made no sense. Yet we know that this is what happened in Euthylia.

So, by the way, going into what's happening in the attacks, I just recently, I never owned a Jewish star. I just recently bought it six weeks ago. I want, I want, and I wanted it shiny. I should have put it at first. I wanted it shiny. So when I deliver presentations, they can see it. 

Zibby: Yeah. They're beautiful.

Really beautiful. 

Talia: Yes. And that brings us to the antisemitic attack. Yeah, that is horrific. It's a modern version of burning Berlin, 1933 burning of Jewish books. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Talia: Except that they now have, they don't have to put a big fire, they have new, new methods through the internet that can bomb books, can destroy authors, and very luckily the Jewish communities, I don't even know who they are, but bloggers and reviewers, kind of circled the wagons about around me when, before my book even came out, and those attacks began. But now we have the list, which is another story that, again, we won't go into that too much unless you want to talk about it. 

Zibby: Yeah, no, no, there was another list this morning, and every day. 

Talia: Another one this morning?

Zibby: Yeah, I just got another, there's another one. There's always more. They're, it's just crazy. I guess, I mean, what we're talking about for those listening is, you know, that there are so many, and you probably already know this listeners, but that there are so many lists circulating of Jewish authors or even authors sympathetic to Jewish people, which is really, you know, crazy, but I mean, the whole thing is crazy, but lists circulating of what people have said, what the involvement is, and, you know, essentially blacklisting people who we should not talk to.

People are saying we should not support people like the two of us and others, which is honestly terrifying. It's, it's terrifying on so many levels, not personal, not just personally, but societally. It's just the whole climate right now I find absolutely terrifying and I'm sure you do too. I'm sure everybody does but your book and, and you as an early target, I feel like you were the first one who was totally like destroyed and before everyone else. I don't know. It's just, I never. Did you think this could happen again? I never thought this could happen again, but maybe. 

Talia: You know, I, I grew up in Israel and I have this sense of security of my identity.

We call it pride. I don't even feel it. It's just who I am. I don't give it much thought because just like you don't give thought, like I'm a woman and I'm Jewish period. 

Zibby: Yep. 

Talia: It's so my husband always said that I who grew up in Brooklyn, that I was not sensitive to situations where he viewed as anti-semitic.

I never experienced direct anti-semitism until six weeks prior to the release of my novel, the book, The Boy with the Star Tattoo. When, oh my God, the shower, shower of one stars on Goodreads and Goodreads refusal to remove them, even though they have a policy against anti harassment, and in my case, the harassment starts with two videos on TikTok, so that it's a call for the campaign.

So it's proven that it is a campaign for harassment, so they don't even have any question to remove all of that, but they have refused. And so far, HarperCollins didn't succeed in that. Jewish Book Council is doing things, but I'm not yet sure what. The fact is, I think somebody told me at the ADL, but basically, we are on our own without any defense.

I think it's because the bigger picture is Israel's survival. Right now, people don't understand. A lot of, too many, hundreds of thousands of useful idiots who have no idea what they're doing and what they're chanting, don't realize that if the war, if Israel, if the Palestinians stop the war, There'll be no more killing, not a single killing.

It's done. It's over. The war is over. If Israel stopped, there would be massacred. And then Israel has now a war in the south, but it's a worse war coming up in the north. And we already seen Iran attack it, uh, two weeks ago, or with 340 missiles, likely missed. But if it were a thousand of 2000 missiles, Israel's existential survival is a question and all of this Israel hatred haters who show up this, you know, people say, oh, I'm not a racist, except when it comes to the Jews and Israel. We can talk about that for an hour but I try to put things in perspective. Yes, so my book is going to be bugged, but luckily, I've been embraced by the Jewish community because of the subject that deals with two Israeli related events, but set in France.

I, my book tour, which has 50 in person events, not including Zoom, between February 1st when it came out to the end of June. This is just four months, in five months, I have 50. in person events and they're all in the Jewish community, all with audiences ranging from, let's say, 75 to 700 people. Huge groups.

I'm very well received. I feel embraced. The book is being selling well. Reviewers love it. I must say that probably I get less of the general media reviews than I used to get before, but that's part of the territory. I knew that I was writing a book that had to do with Israel. I just never thought this was going to go this far.

Zibby: Insane. You say you write about moral dilemmas, just, and I know we're almost out of time, but I could talk to you all day and probably will at other times but how did you arrive at that, that you are an author who writes about moral dilemmas? 

Talia: It's a question of what, what makes a story pop up and that is when every character, small, secondary, has to deal with some moral dilemma.

Life is black and white except for their gray areas, which makes the reader think, well, what would I have done? The reader gets engaged even in a small question that a minor character may face. So the entire, any, any one of my books involves more dilemmas of the different characters. 

Zibby: Amazing. Are you working on another book now?

Talia: When I have time, uh, every time I think, okay, this is the last novel, I'm out of ideas. I don't search for ideas. I wait for them to come to me. And sure enough, it hit me on the head with, with a club. And that's what usually happens. And I realized that it's a subject that I'd been interested in for many, many, many years.

And they are questions that had been in my head that I had not explored. The problem is, is I don't have time now. I hope to spend more of the summer to write it. I have about close to a hundred pages of what we call shitty first draft. Half of it may be thrown, but I, it takes me about four or five years.

I don't put pressure on myself. I let the novel flow out of me, the research as needed i, if the story goes in a different direction, I let it flow for a while. I try not to make, take it too far into places I don't need to be, but I let the, I let the ideas flow and it's very much for me. Like being in a trance, like in a dream, you know, how a dream is and you've now experienced writing your first fiction and I think you, you must have been in that kind of a state when you're so much with your protagonist. So I, I compare it to the moments where, I'm in a trance. I see the sights. I hear the sounds. I, I, I'm inside my, I crawl under the skin of my protagonist, but mostly I feel the emotions, the way you feel in a dream.

They're very real. Mm hmm. Uh, you have a little bit more logic, uh, when you write a novel than when a dream things jump around, but basically that's how I let a scene develop. I close my eyes. I literally close my eyes and I type like this. You know, then I have a lot of fixing, but I, I'm totally there. 

Zibby: I love it.

Wow. And you're such a storyteller, even writing, talking about how you write as a story. So anyway, Talia, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, The Boy with the Star Tattoo, and thank you for being such a great representation of a strong, creative, wonderful Jewish woman out in the world.

Talia: Thank you. Thank you so much, and I must add that, even though it's a Jewish book, Nelson DeMille gave it, they say that, uh, 

Zibby: The blurb. 

Talia: Actually, yes. The blurb here is from Kelly Remer, actually. But Nelson DeMille said, Historical fiction. Don't get better than a The Boy With A Star Tattoo.

Zibby: There you go. Yeah. Not just for Jewish people.

No. 

Talia: Yeah, but for him to say doesn't get better than, I mean, couldn't have said it's very nice. I was really, really flattered. 

So, thank you. 

Zibby: That's amazing. Wow. Congratulations. Well deserved. Thank you. Okay. Bye bye. 

Talia: Bye.