The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East - Hardcover

Tolan, Sandy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582343438 ISBN 13: 9781582343433

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2006

Synopsis

The tale of a simple act of faith between two young people - one Israeli, one Palestinian - that symbolizes the hope for peace in the Middle East.

In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in.

This act of faith in the face of many years of animosity is the starting point for a true story of a remarkable relationship between two families, one Arab, one Jewish, amid the fraught modern history of the regio. In his childhood home, in the lemon tree his father planted in the backyard, Bashir sees dispossession and occupation; Dalia, who arrived as an infant in 1948 with her family from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust. As both are swept up in the fates of their people, and Bashir is jailed for his alleged part in a supermarket bombing, the friends do not speak for years. They finally reconcile and convert the house in Ramle into a day-care centre for Arab children of Israel, and a center for dialogue between Arabs and Jews. Now the dialogue they started seems more threatened than ever; the lemon tree died in 1998, and Bashir was jailed again, without charge.

The Lemon Tree grew out of a forty-three minute radio documentary that Sandy Tolan produced for Fresh Air. With this book, he pursues the story into the homes and histories of the two families at its center, and up to the present day. Their stories form a personal microcosm of the last seventy years of Israeli-Palestinian history. In a region that seems ever more divided, The Lemon Tree is a reminder of all that is at stake, and of all that is still possible.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In the summer of 1967, Bashir a young Palestinian man knocks on the door of his childhood home in the town of Ramla in Israel, a home from which his family was driven some twenty years earlier. The door is opened by a young Jewish woman, Dalia, whose family settled in the house after fleeing persecution in Bulgaria at the end of the Second World War. Thus begins an unlikely and difficult friendship, which bridges religious divides and lasts more than four decades. The Lemon Tree tells the story of this extraordinary friendship and offers a much needed human perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At a time when peace seems remote and darkness deepens, this lucid, humane, hopeful book shines like a ray of light The Times 'Reads like a novel...an informed take for anyone interested in the human stories behind a conflict New Statesman A fascinating and highly absorbing account full of warmth, compassion and hope Belfast Telegraph Extraordinary…a highly readable and evocative history Washington Post Affecting…sensitively told. Humane and literate and rather daring in suggesting that the future of the Middle East need not be violent Kirkus Reviews

About the Author:

Sandy Tolan is the author of Me & Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty-five Years Later. He has written for the New York Times Magazine and for more than 40 other magazines and newspapers. As cofounder of Homelands Productions, Tolan has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. His work has won numerous awards, and he was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an I. F. Stone Fellow at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he directs the school's Project on International Reporting.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1582343438
• ISBN 13: 9781582343433
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304