By NATASHA ALTAMIRANO
Every city has its history.
The buildings that line its streets, housing shops, offices and homes.
The families who inhabited those buildings, who laid the bricks and stones, who planted flowers and vegetables and fruits.
Sandy Tolan's "The Lemon Tree" tells the dual history of Ramla, or al-Ramla in Arabic, in what is now Israel but once was Palestine.
Tolan tells the story through a building on the city's eastern edge--a stone house with a lemon tree in the backyard.
For the Arab Khairi family, the home they built represented hope and faith in the future of their family and its prosperity. Later, after hundreds of thousands of Arabs were forced from their homes by Jewish forces, the Khairis' home became a concrete expression of their belief in the Palestinian right of return.
For the Jewish Eshkenazi family of Bulgaria, the former Khairi home in Ramla symbolized hope of a different kind: the Zionist concept of "aliyah," or Jewish emigration to the Holy Land.
Tolan follows the lives of two real people he met as a journalist working on an NPR documentary: Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi.
The author juxtaposes the Arabs' perceptions of events with those of the Jews:
"On November 30, 1947, when word arrived that the Soviets had joined the United States in supporting the UN plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, celebration broke out in cities across Bulgaria," he writes. "This was the same news that the Khairis had greeted with shock and disbelief in al-Ramla."
What is celebrated as a victory by one family is a crushing defeat for the other.
The Jewish Zionists saw their emigration to then-Palestine as the return to their homeland after 2,000 years in exile, "a chance to fulfill the Talmudic promise 'He who makes four steps in Israel, all his sins will be forgiven.'"
The Palestinian Arabs saw the Zionist movement as an invasion of their country.
What Israelis remember as the War of Independence in 1948 is remembered by Arabs as Nakba, or "catastrophe."
A martyr's revenge to one people is an act of terrorism to the other.
And yet, despite the polarizing beliefs about the rights of their respective people, Bashir and Dalia maintained a nearly 40-year friendship.
In Dalia's own words to Bashir in a 2004 conversation, she says, "We couldn't find two people who could disagree more on how to visualize the viability of this land. And yet we are so deeply connected. And what connects us? The same thing that separates us. This land."
As a journalist and documentarian, Tolan objectively recounts Ramla's history.
He devotes equal time to both the Arab and Jewish causes, which, ironically, are the same: to protect their homeland.
The author subtly raises poignant questions: Who has the right to lay claim to a land? The people with the strongest army? Those who occupied it most recently, expanding its cities and enriching its soil? Those who were there first, millennia ago?
Founded in A.D. 715, "in the next thousand years, al-Ramla would be conquered by the Crusaders, liberated by the Muslim hero Saladin, and ruled by the Ottoman Sultans from Istanbul," Tolan writes.
The land would be occupied by the British, partitioned by the United Nations and soaked in the blood of Arabs and Jews in the vicious cycle of violence for years to come.
At times, "The Lemon Tree" is a gripping news report:
"In the middle of July 1948, Ramallah, meaning 'Hill of God' in Arabic, had been transformed from a quiet Christian hill town in northern Palestine to a depository of misery and trauma," Tolan writes of the Palestinians' plight after expulsion. "One hundred thousand refugees crowded into school yards, gymnasiums, convents, army barracks and any other space they could find in the town and surrounding villages."
At other times, "The Lemon Tree" reads like a novel.
Tolan captures, with painstaking detail, what the displaced Arabs lost when forced from their homes:
"They left their fields of wild peas and jasmine, passiflora and dried scarlet anemone, mountain lilies that grew between the barley and the wheat," he writes. "They left their olives and oranges, lemons and apricots, spinach and okra and peppers. They left their silk and linen, silver bracelets and chokers, amber, coral and necklaces with Austrian coins."
Throughout the book, Tolan's ability to personalize the respective struggles of the Jewish and Arab people humanizes the Middle East conflict that too often appears on the front pages of world newspapers.
"The Lemon Tree" contextualizes the way in which the decades-long struggle began.
Most importantly, it implies that, despite the land's bleak and bloody history, there is potential for hope.
To reach NATASHA ALTAMIRANO:
Email: naltamirano@freelancestar.com
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East By Sandy Tolan (Bloomsbury, 304 pages, $24.95) |