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

Tolan, Sandy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596913436 ISBN 13: 9781596913431

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2007

Synopsis

In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian, journeyed to Israel with the goal of seeing the beloved stone house with the lemon tree behind it that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family left fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust. On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and tested over the next half century in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967. Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, demonstrating that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and transformation.

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 and Children of the Stone. As cofounder of Homelands Productions, Tolan has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. He has also written for more than forty magazines and newspapers. 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. He is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1596913436
• ISBN 13: 9781596913431
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400