Talia Carner is the New York-based award-winning author of five novels and numerous articles. Her historical and psychological suspense novels bring to the forefront indignities and atrocities long ignored. Inspired by Sholem Aleichem's short story, THE THIRD DAUGHTER (HarperCollins, September 2019,) is her most daring novel, and it is expected to spur readers to activism against today’s scourge of human trafficking.
THE THIRD DAUGHTER breaks the silence on a most shameful chapter—the legal Jewish sex-trafficking union, Zwi Migdal, that operated with impunity for 70 years, from the late 1880s until WWII. Luring an estimated 200,000 young girls from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to South America with false promises of jobs and marriages, it then forced them into prostitution.
THE THIRD DAUGHTER is tribute to the victims, whose voices the author could not silence—and the launch of her campaign against today’s sex-trafficking.
INTERVIEW TALKING POINTS:
- Zwi Migdal, the legal trafficking organization headquartered in Buenos Aires that operated with impunity from 1870 to 1939, victimizing between 150,000 to 220,000 Jewish girls and women.
- The interests of the Argentine government in making prostitution flourish in the late-1800 and early-1900.
- The cultural growth of Buenos Aires—often referred to as “the Paris of South-America”—as a direct result of prostitution.
- The little known story of Baron Maurice de Hirsch and his resettlement vision for Eastern-European Jews, victims of endless pogroms—the largest philanthropic enterprise at the time.
- Media and international bodies’ reportage and actions in the early 1900s’ to the fast-growing international sex trafficking.
- The almost-only published English-language fiction about Zwi Migdal, a 1909 short story by Sholem Aleichem, (the Yiddish storyteller whose Tevye’s character was later adapted to Fiddler on the Roof,) was the inspiration to THE THIRD DAUGHTER.
- The research about a trafficking ring and life in Buenos Aires 120 years ago.
- Understanding of sex trafficking not only across borders, as it includes any coercion into performing sexual acts with and paid for by a third party, and applied to domestic sexual exploitation of children.
- Sex trafficking today—both the same and different from the time of the novel. Actions that can be taken now by governments, companies, and individuals to abolish it.
Talia Carner worked for Redbook magazine and was the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine. A marketing consultant to Fortune 500 companies, she taught at Long Island University and was a volunteer counselor for the Small Business Administration. A committed supporter of global human rights, she has spearheaded projects centered on the subjects of female plight. In 1993 she sent twice to Russia, and participated in the 1995 women's conference in Beijing.
Hailed as “an author who enters arenas no one has entered before” for her five novels that expose society’s ills, Ms. Carner has keynoted or co-paneled over 300 civic and cultural events with 100 to 500 attendees.
Ms. Carner is a board member of HBI, a research center for Jewish women's life and culture at Brandeis University. She is also an honorary board member of several anti-domestic violence and child abuse intervention organizations and supports organizations that work toward Israeli causes.
Talia Carner's addictions include chocolate, ballet, hats—and social justice.
