6 North Shore Towers Courier n November 2016 by Stephen Vratos On Thursday, September 22, members, North Shore Towers residents and friends gathered in Towers on the Green for the first ever Book and Author Luncheon sponsored by Migdal Chapter of Hadassah. The idea for such an event was an outgrowth of the long standing Migdal Book Discussion Group and came from its co-leaders, Bern Rosenthal and Arlene Augenbraun, who wanted to try a new venture. At the recommendation of the Jewish Book Council, they decided to invite bestselling author, Talia Carner, to be the premiere headliner for their inaugural Book and Author Luncheon. As a seventh-generation Sabra, who incorporates her heritage in all her writing, as well as being a Board Member of Hadassah-Brandeis Institute since 2005, Carner was the perfect candidate. Serendipitously soon thereafter, Rosenthal and Augenbraun met writer, reviewer and contributor to Hadassah Magazine, Stewart Kampel, and his wife, Susan. In conversation, they discovered that Talia Carner and her husband, Ron, were old friends of the Kampels, which is how the couple came to introduce Carner to the members and friends of the Migdal Chapter of Hadassah at the historic luncheon. Carner began her talk by quoting Ernest Hemingway. “First, clean your refrigerator,” Hemingway once said, when asked how one should approach writing a book. “No novel came out of cleaning refrigerators,” Carner remarked of her own experiences putting pen to paper or cuticles to computer as may be more befitting of today’s technology. Long before turning her attention toward writing fiction, Talia Carner was a successful career woman. Along with working as an adjunct professor of marketing at Long Island University and a marketing consultant to Fortune 500 companies, she volunteered as a counselor and lecturer for the Small Business Administration, served as a marketing manager for “Redbook” and publisher on “Savvy” magazine, among other achievements. So it only seemed logical when Carner was invited by United States Information Agency to participate in missions to Russia, in order to teach women entrepreneurial skills. It was these trips which served as the inspiration for her latest novel “Hotel Moscow.” The Soviet Union had only just fallen 16 months prior to Carner’s initial venture to Russia in April 1993, and what greeted her was far removed from the romantic notions most Americans have of what occurs after the collapse of a totalitarian state and introduction of democracy. Chaos reined and the idea of a democratic utopia was a distant dream. Carner recalls meeting two types of women. The first were highly educated and included physicians and engineers. Despite their brains, they had no sense of business. Unsurprising, when one takes into account the fact that these women were raised under a system wherein the government dictated everything one did and placed people in various positions. The women lived in 10-foot x 13-foot communal apartments; as many as thirty individuals sharing a single bathroom and fighting over the use of a handful of stoves. Conditions were so austere that even the electricity used in the buzzing of the doorbell was calculated, the minute costs attributed to whomever the intended visitor was coming to see. The local police precincts closed at 4 p.m. and all had unlisted numbers, so even if you needed assistance during the daylight hours, you had no way of contacting them. In an effort to curb the hysteria and establish some order, President Boris Yeltsin enacted thousands of new laws a year. What few jobs became available went to men. And the greatest concern to this segment of females was learning how to form a group to protect themselves. Conversely, Carner also met with factory workers; women maybe less educated, but in a way, better off, with practical skills more easily utilized in a fledgling society. Still, they were no more business savvy than their female counterparts. Upon visiting a factory, which manufactures cleaning brushes, Carner asked the cost of a single brush and nearly plotzed, when told it was $150,000. The workers had calculated the entire cost of the start-up of the factory, the materials, labor, utilities, etc. and placed it on the first item to be sold, so as to recoup their expenditures, rather than tally the expenses over the entire product line. Each group of women, however, shared their utter disbelief when Carner revealed her time teaching them was not being monetarily compensated for; it was all volunteer work, a concept totally alien to them, the antithesis of the dog-eat-dog world in which they were raised. Yet, Carner admitted she was actually richly compensated by the immense satisfaction she derived from teaching, generously imparting her experience and wisdom for the betterment of others. It was also the prime force behind her returning to Russia in October 1993. Carner landed only two hours after an uprising against President Yeltsin, and she was placed under house arrest. Back home, her husband and the U.S. government immediately began fighting for her release. As Carner was escorted to the airport to leave, she was horrified to see an image of Yeltsin within a Cyrillic triangle that had been turned into the Star of David, as if to suggest the woes of the country were caused by Jews. Once again, anti- Semitism reared its hateful head. “Not again!” she thought. It took twenty years for Carner to process that dreadful moment into “Hotel Moscow.” Carner was pleasantly surprised to see a vast majority of the attendees raise their hands, when she asked who had read “Hotel Moscow.” An audience member inquired whether she wrote herself into the novel. “I’m never any of my characters, but I gave Brook my business experience,” she revealed of the heroine of “Hotel Moscow.” There are few surer ways to measure the efficacy of a speaker than how quiet the room is when he/she talks. The quiet did not escape the notice of one audience member, who remarked that she couldn’t remember a time when the membership had been so attentive during a lecture. Bern Rosenthal was then joined by her chairing partner Arlene Augenbraun to surprise Carner with a citation thanking and acknowledging Carner as the debut author of what they hoped would be a continuing series for the Migdal Chapter of Hadassah. By the response of the crowd, it appears as if there are many stories yet to be told. Author! Author! Hadassah Inaugural Author Luncheon Is One for the Books Photos by Stephen Vrattos Talia Carner autographs copies of her latest, “Hotel Moscow”
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