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The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
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The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East Paperback - 2007

by Sandy Tolan

Based on a 43-minute radio documentary that Tolan produced for "Fresh Air," this volume pursues the story into the homes and histories of the two families at its center through the present day. Their stories form a personal microcosm of the last 70 years of Israeli-Palestinian history.


Summary

The true story of a friendship spanning religious divisions and four decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.In the summer of 1967, not long after the Six Day War, three young Palestinian men ventured into the town of Ramla in Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes, from which they and their families had been driven out nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had the door slammed in his face, one found that his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir, was met at the door by a young woman named Dalia, who invited him in... This poignant encounter is the starting point for the story of two families – one Arab, one Jewish – which spans the fraught modern history of the region. In the lemon tree his father planted in the backyard of his childhood home, Bashir sees a symbol of occupation; Dalia, who arrived in 1948 as an infant with her family, as a fugitive from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust. Both are inevitably swept up in the fates of their people and the stories of their lives form a microcosm of more than half a century of Israeli-Palestinian history.What began as a simple meeting between two young people grew into a dialogue lasting four decades. The Lemon Tree offers a much needed human perspective on this seemingly intractable conflict and reminds us not only of all that is at stake, but also of all that is possible.

From the publisher

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST "Extraordinary ... A sweeping history of the Palestinian-Israeli conundrum ... Highly readable and evocative." - The Washington Post The tale of a simple act of faith between two young people, one Israeli and one Palestinian, that symbolizes the hope for peace in the Middle East - with an updated afterword by the author. 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.

Details

  • Title The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
  • Author Sandy Tolan
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition Reprint
  • Pages 400
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Bloomsbury USA, New York, New York, U.S.A.
  • Date 2007-05-01
  • Features Annotated, Bibliography, Index, Maps, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9781596913431 / 1596913436
  • Weight 0.92 lbs (0.42 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.37 x 5.53 x 0.99 in (21.26 x 14.05 x 2.51 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 21st Century
    • Chronological Period: 1950-1999
    • Cultural Region: Middle Eastern
    • Ethnic Orientation: Arabic
    • Ethnic Orientation: Jewish
  • Library of Congress subjects Palestinian Arabs, Jews
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

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.
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