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

This chapter begins with a young Jewish salesman named Moshe Eshkenazi, who discovers a wallet in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, in 1943. Wearing a yellow star that marks him as a Jew, he turns the wallet in at the police station, where a senior policeman tells him there is a plan afoot to deport the Jews and that Moshe should clear out. Moshe takes his wife Solia out of the capital to her family’s house in Sliven on the Black Sea.

In 1943 Bulgaria, the kingdom of Boris III was allied with the Axis powers. During the warm months, Jewish men like Moshe had to work in camps, building roads and railways for the Axis. The 47,000 Jews in Bulgaria had heard the horrific tales of what was happening to Jews elsewhere in Europe, and their rights had been taken away by laws modeled on the Nuremberg laws in Germany.

At the same time, Susannah Shemuel Behar, the daughter of the rabbi of Plovdiv, is reading Jack London in her family’s den when the doorbell rings. Susannah is part of the Partizan resistance, and she hides her anti-Fascist literature in her father’s Bible. The person ringing the bell is a neighbor who tells the rabbi that his family is going to be arrested soon.