In a story of courage and healing one woman searches for her missing child, while another is recruited for a secret operation in defense of her country.

How these stories connect is the epic historical novel, "The Boy with the Star Tattoo."

I am Ann Bocock and welcome to "Between the Covers."

Talia Carner is an award-winning author of six novels.

She's the former publisher of "Savvy Woman Magazine."

She is a sought after lecturer on the plight of women and supporter of global human rights.

Her latest book is "The Boy with the Star Tattoo."

Talia, welcome.

Thank you so much.

It's wonderful to be here again.

This book was not what I expected.

I expected an actual Holocaust story, and what we have here are two timelines, 1946 and 1968.

So I wanna start at the very beginning with a woman named Claudette.

She's a French seamstress.

She is disabled.

She discovers she's pregnant.

Now tell me as much about her story as you are comfortable without giving a lot away.

I was fascinated by the idea that an illiterate woman in a country that's seeped with antisemitism all around her has an experience with Jews.

In this particular case, one Jew who taught her how to read because she was disabled she couldn't actually walk to school, which is what was happening in those villages.

And he also got her a brace.

He gave her holy water, so to speak, and said, "If you put it on and raise your leg 10 times in the morning and 10 times in the evening, the holy water will work.

Of course, what worked was the fact that she was doing exercises.

Her experience with Jews, which was just this one person, was very different from what everybody else was telling her.

And that was the story I wanted to tell about her.

Then it developed because when I write a book, I don't know where the journey is going to take me.

I've heard you say that before.

The second timeline is 1968, and this is this daring escape.

There's an international crisis.

It was the Boats of Cherbourg, and there's another woman, she's a young Israeli, her name is Sharon.

She is recruited from Israel, she's sent to France.

So before we talk about Sharon, tell me a bit about this daring operation.

It's a fascinating story that those who know a little bit of Israel's history know about the daring action of Entebbe when Israel managed to steal back its own air, sorry.

The aircraft.

The aircraft full of Israeli passengers, but this is second in terms of history, even though it had happened before.

It happened in '68, '69.

And Entebbe happened in '74.

But it was an incredible operation.

The backstory is that Israel had ordered 12 boats to be built in a shipyard, private shipyard in Cherbourg, in Normandy, France.

And by the Six-Day War and a bit after seven had been delivered, they were supposedly for oil exploration, even though the Navy was in charge and a navy mission was living permanently in Cherbourg.

But until the arrest of the five boats arrived, Israel could not arm those boats.

And it was a very interesting situation, very risky, where Israel vulnerabilities were very open to the world.

Historically, what happened in the 1960s was that all of Israel's enemies, I'm talking about Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, were all armed by Russia.

Israel was the only one since its establishment for 19 years now, I'm talking from '48 to '69, '68.

was getting all of its arms from France.

All the tanks, all of the airplanes were French made.

Comes the Six-Day War and a little bit after some operation took place and all of Israel's enemies unfortunately lost the war in six days.

And France announced an arms embargo.

de Gaulle announced an arms embargo.

Cynically, he said on the Middle East, but only Israel was the one that France was arming.

Israel needed those boats, in the meanwhile, it was not even getting spare parts for the airplanes and the tanks that were there coming out of becoming absolute.

So what was there to do?

And for a very long time, Israel started planning, the navy started planning.

Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, who had been the prime minister and chief of staff, was somewhat aware of it, but this was a naval operation, was done separately to prepare for various scenarios.

It's a very interesting part of that book and this very daring escapade.

So I'm gonna go back to Sharon because she is recruited to go to... Who is she?

Sharon came to me when I started my research and I, at that time, that summer of 1917, actually I didn't have time to research that 'cause I was writing another novel, "The Third Daughter."

But things would happen.

We can talk more about it, but I found myself in Cherbourg, France, walking in the streets.

I've had a lot of research information in my head, but what was the story?

And I knew that if I'd walk around in Cherbourg, the story would come to me.

And sure enough, my third day, wow, this is Sharon whom I had to happen to know.

Many of my readers are not gonna remember because she had a cameo appearance in the epilogue of "Jerusalem Maiden."

But I knew her history, I knew who she was, I knew her family, I knew what had happened to her.

I knew her parents had been killed in the War of Independence when she was only six weeks old.

I know a lot about her.

And she happened in the ending of "Jerusalem Maiden", when she shows up in that epilogue.

She happens to be in, it happened to be in 1968 and she happened to be in Paris.

And what we find out about her in this book, she has a amazing story.

We're talking about what was clandestine immigration.

And that was an interesting term for me.

I wasn't really familiar with it being put that way.

You write beautifully about Youth Aliyah.

And after the Holocaust, agents were sent to France in the countryside to rescue hidden Jewish orphans, correct?

Yes, and I must say that this operation was taking place all over Europe.

I just focused my story on France.

You grew up in Israel.

You were, like everyone else, the young people, you were in the IDF, the Israel Defense Force.

I'm curious if you knew people who had been rescued by Youth Aliyah.

I probably did, here and there I did, but it wasn't something people talked about in a social setting.

"Oh, I lost my parents in the Holocaust.

Nobody showed up to pick me up when I was four years old or eight years old.

And I lived with some nuns" or whatever the story in a farmhouse.

People don't talk like this about this trauma, the traumas of their lives.

But I, you know, enough here and there, something about the history of people.

And in that respect, I knew something about some, like the brother of a friend of mine who had been adopted.

Adopted?

The father was an Holocaust survivor coming out of the camps in Poland and crossing Europe on his way to any port that would take him on any ship anywhere.

And he slept one night in a monastery.

And in the morning as he was leaving, the monk said to him, "Look, somebody left a child here a few years ago.

We don't know what to do with him.

Would you take him?"

And he said okay.

And this story still gives me goosebumps.

It does to me.

Because the kid, they had no idea what his name was, what his parents.

Now he was about six.

They think he was six years old.

And this man took him on his way to Bolivia.

He found a ship to Bolivia and met his wife to be, they had got married, adopted this boy, had their own child together, David, who was my very good friend.

So he always had this brother, was about seven years older and I knew that story, and that secondhand way of stories.

And it's not to be overstated, these were children that were taken to a place, to Israel, where they probably knew no one, that they didn't speak the language, and how interesting in your book as to what comes out of this.

Talia, I have to say that when I read, sometimes the timing is exactly perfect.

And when I read this book, it was just at the time where Israel was under a terrorist attack and the war with Gaza was starting.

And as I said before, the book is more of a, less to me of a Holocaust story than a book about Israel, about its beginning, its sense of self, and its commitment to survival.

And in the context of everything that is going on, I'd love you to comment on that.

What struck me as very interesting and what I wanted to bring up in both cases, the big thing about the Boats of Cherbourg was how committed were those Israelis, the team that lived there, to Israel, to the mission, in understanding that they have to do it.

They must get those boats.

And when I interviewed many of family members because this happened 50 years ago, and luckily I interviewed about 17 people who had been involved starting with about 14 officers, engineers, but also a wife of one of the men who was a young bride.

And she used to do Friday night dinner.

And I called her and she says, "This is the worst day of my life.

I'm putting my husband in a memory facility care."

And I knew about this hero.

And she said, "But no one ever asked me about how I felt and why I stuck with my husband through a birth of a baby in this horrible French hospital.

And you're the first one."

And I said, "It's because I'm interested in the commitment of everyone around it to the project."

And that's what I loved about understanding this spirit of what I remembered when I was younger.

I've left Israel, so I can't even comment on those who have changed or the spirit that may not have continued.

The other thing that interested me back in '46, '47, when those teams of rescuers, they call it which translates to agents, when they were roaming the countryside and they had money, Israel was very poor and they had money to give out to, they find a child in some farmhouse and they would say, "May I pay you for the years, the expenses you took?"

And they never kept count.

There was so much trust in these agents, and turns out the money, it's amazing where it came from.

But those of you, many of of the viewers know the organization Hadassah.

And they know Henrietta Szold who had established it in 1911, which happens to be the time of my book, "Jerusalem Maiden."

But this is 40 years later, the same woman is now running this clandestine operation of rescuing Jewish children.

And she was an American living in the United States and she got a lot of money and she was giving it out.

The book is so well researched, and I know you and I know you love doing your research.

I assume you have also spent a good deal of time in France to do this.

Five trips.

Five trips.

Okay.

Five trips.

Three were absolutely necessary.

Two were by invitations that I could have, probably one I had, well, I put those invitations, those conversations on speakerphone so my husband who heard it, he says to them, "Tell him you'll come next spring."

You know, whatever were the situation.

And they were very important, it turned out to be important as well.

You write historical fiction and I'm curious for you is the challenge finding the balance between the history and the storytelling because you want it to be entertaining?

Yes.

It's very... And I cannot speak for other authors, so I speak only for myself, but it's very easy to be bogged down by information.

And for me, the way I handle that is I crawl under the skin of my point of view character and only see what he sees, he or she sees and hears and knows rather than come outside as an author and give a third person explanation.

I don't do that.

So the information is only what that particular point of view character knows and experiences.

You always write strong female characters.

I can tell it's your book by that.

There are several in this book.

There's Sharon, there's Claudette, who was the French seamstress.

And I have to put in this category, Sharon's grandmother, because I thought she was a fabulous character.

Tell me about how writing such dynamic women.

Each one stands on her own.

Sharon is really my contemporary, but has a history that's nothing like my own.

But as I said, I'd known her history when I started.

Eventually she was recruited in Israel, but my in original draft, it was in Paris.

But then I changed that.

But Sharon's grandmother is a character I knew.

So many readers had asked me at the time, for "Jerusalem Maiden", if I can write about her, what's the next book?

And I couldn't, I didn't have enough of a story.

This one came totally by accident.

She's an old lady, she's 44 years later.

And she had accepted life went in different ways, not necessarily the way she had seen back in the youth.

And I think tragedies change people.

And she had lost a son who is Sharon's father.

And unfortunately, again, we have been seeing this last two months what happened in Israel.

And we see it every day now with the war that's going on.

It is nothing worse than burying a son or a daughter or a child.

It's bad for any family member.

As I said, I thought the grandmother was a marvelous character.

Each of the storylines of these three women were very strong on their own.

They actually could have stood alone and had their separate stories.

I wanna know if you always knew that the story would be told in multiple timelines with multiple characters.

I know I started with the Boats of Cherbourg.

And I then went in to find Sharon as my protagonist who tells this story because I don't write naval warfare.

I'm not that kind of a writer.

There writers who do that.

So as interesting as that story was for me, I had to step back, and for also for my readers.

My readers would not be as interested in naval warfare, but they would be interested in patriotism, in questions of identity.

And those questions of identity come up throughout the book.

Who am I?

If I didn't know my mother?

And this is what sometimes other adoptees or people who had lost their parents keep asking.

"I didn't know my parent.

Who am I if I don't know anything about my parent?"

That is a question of identity.

that is a question of identity as being part of a country, of culture, of perhaps an ethnic group.

And then comes Claudette, who is so different, but she's defined by her disability.

We don't like to do that.

It's not politically correct, but the fact is that this is what her life was like in a time and place where a person was disabled had no chance.

And as the Nazis were arriving, they were going for the gypsies, the Jews, and the disabled.

It was one category.

So there were no gypsies in France, there were a lot of Jews and there were not that many disabled.

Which of these three women were you drawn to the most?

I went in with Sharon, but there were times that Claudette had taken over and as you say, she could have been a book by itself.

And in fact I had to cut 10 chapters of Claudette in order to give her a much smaller space.

Otherwise I would've had a 600 page book.

And that's also not possible.

That's a lot of writing, Talia.

Yes, so I normally, I would say that by now, at the point where I am in my writing, I don't write supposedly wasted chapters.

I don't let characters take me to places I don't need to be.

But this was a case, maybe I explored her further, but I did it and then I...

I think that the biggest challenge was putting together three timelines.

And I must say that the first thing for me was I did not want to write about the Holocaust.

And it's not.

Even though the title would tell one that it is.

Something about it, but it's not, other than Claudette sees the war as an outsider who totally does not get it.

She doesn't get why the Jews are hiding.

She doesn't get what's happening to them.

So it's really not the Holocaust.

But from that point on, from '46, that is when we start to meet the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Yes.

And again, there are as many tragic stories as there were people.

Talia, let's switch it up.

I know that you are multilingual, which makes me very jealous.

As a writer are there ever words or phrases that are perfect in one language but it's hard to grasp in another?

Yes, there are words that exist in one language that do not exist in the other, and I just have to make the switch.

If I could see your bookshelf at home, what would it say about you?

You know, during COVID I moved out of New York City, and we had three rooms with bookshelves and we realized the cost of real estate, of keeping so many books.

So my husband and I each took boxes and put those that we like.

I realized what I could not give up were my research books, because they do not appear in digital.

They are one of a kind.

And that's the one area of many books on my bookshelves for previous books, no matter which ones, but they are different.

Russian writing translated to English.

The latest book is "The Boy with the Star Tattoo."

Talia Carter, it has been such a pleasure to talk with you as it always is.

I wish we had more time.

Thank you so much.

I'm Ann Bocock.

Please join me on the next, "Between the Covers."