One House, Two Tales

Sandy Tolan’s new book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, uses a house in Ramla to tell a very poignant story from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Twenty years after his family was forced to flee their house in Ramla, a Palestinian man named Bashir al-Khairi returned to visit it. Thus began an enduring friendship with the woman who now lives in his boyhood home, an Israeli woman named Dalia Eshkenazi. The two tales, one Jewish, one Palestinian, are entertwined in Tolan’s book, and you can listen to interviews with al-Khairi, Eshkenazi, and Sandy Tolan himself, on NPR. An amazing story.