The Lemon Tree

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. After reading Sandy Tolan’s well written book, The Lemon Tree, lemons will never taste the same to me. The story of the lemon tree helped me see history in a new light. I saw pain, tragedy and hope of two peoples, sharing same home, same land, and same destiny. Newspapers, politics, history books, told me one side of the story. I grew up as a Jew in Israel learning the story of our peoples from history books. The sixty years of history I believed in were shattered after reading the book. The other, the “enemy,” suffers as much as we, the Jews, did. In fact, there are no winners or losers, no victories or defeats. There are only individual human beings who suffer. The book is written both as a novel and a historical document. Two people, an Arab and a Jew, tell personal narratives that center on the lemon tree, creating an authentic historical portrayal of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In this book, sour lemons have the potential of bringing people together, when both sides can see the human part in the “other” and perhaps sweeten the flavor of the fruit. w. In 2000 Israeli and Palestinian leaders met with President Clinton and others at Camp David (pp. 234-39). There are widely varying interpretations of why the summit collapsed. Describe it from Ehud Barak and Israel’s point of view, and then from Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians’. How would you explain the collapse? Dalia finds it hard to understand how someone she cares about, and supposedly someone who cares about her, can want the annihilation of her people. Yet Israel is also carrying out deeds of brutality, torture and murder, as they invade lands preemptively to protect their territory and their settlers. She finds it hard to justify or understand either behavior. This is the true story of Dalia, a Bulgarian Jew, and Bashir, a Palestinian Arab. Both were uprooted from their homes for different, but related reasons; one was uprooted because of the Holocaust in Europe and the other because of the founding of the state of Israel which resulted from the heinous acts committed against Jews during the Holocaust. It must be mentioned here that the Arabs of Palestine supported Hitler and his Holocaust. They had a common enemy: Jews and Great Britain.

THE LEMON TREE | Kirkus Reviews

It is a book a would recommend that you read -- but also that I would ask you to read. I feel we have a responsiblity to know these stories. In early 1998, embarking on a new series of first-person documentaries for NPR, I went off in search of a story that would connect two great and tragic narratives of the Middle East -- that of the Israelis, and that of the Palestinians -- in a personal way, through a singular story. It was coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first Arab-Israeli war, and I wanted to find a human story that would evoke both narratives, as experienced by each side. To Israelis, it's the War of Independence; to Palestinians, it's the Nakba, or "Catastrophe."The book is also about an uncanny friendship between this Palestinain and his dear friend who was the child of a family that relocated to Israel after WWII to find a new freedom.

Lemon Tree (Tolan) - LitLovers Lemon Tree (Tolan) - LitLovers

After several weeks, I found my story. It was about two families who were connected by the same stone home in the Israeli town of Ramla. I learned that a Palestinian family, the Khairis, had built the house in 1936, and planted a lemon tree in the yard. They lived there until the war, when like almost all the families of that town, they were forced into exile by the arriving Israeli army. The eldest son of that family was Bashir, six years old, who vowed that some day, he would return home with the many other Arab families who were driven out of Palestine. Sandy Tolan is a teacher and radio documentary producer. He is the author of two books: Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-Five Years Later (Free Press, 2000), about the intersection between race, sports, and American heroes; and The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2006). The Washington Post called the book “extraordinary” and selected it among their top nonfiction titles for 2006; the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “no novel could be more compelling” and proclaimed, “It will be one of the best nonfiction books you will read this year.”Sandy has reported from more than 30 countries, especially in the Middle East, Latin America, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. I loved reading The Lemon Tree. You talked about how you were raised with an appreciation for the Jewish story but without similar Arab sensitivities. Conversely, I grew up in a country which… censored movies and magazines to eliminate any words, actors, politicians, or historical figures who/which were Jewish …Being a progressive liberal thinker I have tried to leave my learned biases behind. But I have never had the historical framework … to develop the understanding necessary… Reading The Lemon Tree left me finally without blame for either side and with sympathy and pride in both people’s plights.

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Bashir's parents built the house with their own hands, a testament to their hard work, and they lived there for years, running the local cinema for work. Eventually, Israeli-Palestinian violence drove the family out, and in 1948, when the nation state of Israel was recognized by the world as its own nation, the family permanently lost the house. It has been 19 years since their eviction. On Monday morning, June 5, 1967, Bashir Khairi stood before a judge in civil court, arguing a case on behalf of his client, a Mr. al-Abed. Bashir was now 25 and a recent graduate of Cairo University Law School, specializing in labor matters. The court had convened in Ramallah in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, the territory King Abdullah had annexed to his kingdom 17 years earlier. His grandson Hussein was now Jordan's king and head of state. b. (RG2) Dalia’s very existence, and her arrival as an infant to Israel in November 1948, is the result of remarkable circumstances that combined to save some 47,000 Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust. What do you think the most important of these factors was? How much importance would you put on the actions of Dimitur Peshev, the parliamentarian, or Bishops Kiril and Stephan – and how much to other factors? Finally, the book (p. 43) describes Dalia as carrying “an extraordinary legacy” with her to Israel in 1948. What was that legacy? Yet while Nasser privately expressed his preference for a peaceful solution, to the rest of the world the voices coming out of Cairo seemed certain of war and confident of victory. Nasser himself had declared, at a press conference on May 28, "We are prepared, our sons are prepared, our army is prepared, and the entire Arab nation is prepared." A broadcast from the Voice of Cairo dared Israel to strike: "We challenge you, Eshkol, to try all your weapons. Put them to the test, they will spell Israel's death and annihilation."

The Lemon Tree — SANDY TOLAN

When it comes to the details and complicated history of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, I am admittedly shamefully ignorant. I was always aware of the conflict in a general sense of course, but I never took the time to really research it beyond what I heard on the news or remembered learning in school (which was very little). Across the West Bank and in exile, young men confronted their parents with their plans. Fathers demanded their sons seek the safety of higher education in Cairo or London; one son, a young man named Bassam Abu-Sharif, asked his father, "What is a Ph.D. when we have no country?" He did not want to be "an eternal foreigner, a landless, homeless, stateless, shamed, despised Palestinian refugee." Bassam, after joining the PFLP, would recall telling his angry father, "I would rather be in prison in my own country than be a free man in exile. I would rather be dead." On May 23, the day after Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran and taunted the Israeli public, Israel's cabinet sent Foreign Minister Abba Eban on a diplomatic mission to Paris, London, and Washington.As the occupation wore on, a sense of calm and clarity began to settle over Bashir. The loss was devastating, but it made one thing clear: Palestinians could rely only on themselves to deliver their own justice. It was clear that the right of return, guaranteed by United Nations Resolution 194, would never be delivered by the U.N. or the international community. Return was subsequently promised by the Arab states whose armed forces instead were crushed and humiliated. The Arab states still put up a rhetorical front -- in the days after the war, they would publicly declare "no reconciliation, no negotiation, and no recognition" regarding Israel -- but these were increasingly taken as empty words by Palestinians. This reminds me of that joke to the effect that before the coming of the missionaries, the natives had the land and the colonialists had the bible. Afterward, the natives had the bible and the colonialists the land.