The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (17 page)

"Though on several occasions since his interview with the Military Governor, Mr. Shomski promised me to return the door and shutters and to re-condition my house," wrote an Arab resident of Lydda in December 1949, "up to this date nothing has been done. On the contrary, owing to the absence of doors and windows unknown persons have carried out extensive damage to my house. . . . I shall be very much obliged if you will give your instructions . . . to return my doors and window shutters as soon as possible."

"I beg to submit the following for your kind consideration," wrote an al-Ramla landowner, an Arab whose plea had begun in March 1949. "I am the registered owner of the following pieces of land: Parcel No. 69; Block No. 4374; Locality Ramie [Ramla]; Area 5,032 Sq. Metres. . . . All these parcels, including my own share, were treated by the Apetropos [Custodian of Abandoned Properties] as Absentee Properties in spite of the fact that I am not an absentee. . . ."

"I am the registered owner of Half of Parcel 13," wrote an Arab appellant to the local council of Kibbutz Gezer, five miles southeast of Ramla. "I am prepared to pay the Local Council's taxes on my share in the Parcel. . . . I shall be obliged also to know who has ploughed my land and with whose authority he did so."

In a black-and-white photograph taken in the backyard of the stone house in Ramla, Dalia stands beside a lemon tree, looking into the camera with tears in her eyes. The image was taken in the summer, perhaps of 1950; Dalia would have been two and a half. She'd been crying briefly, offended by the sparrows who had chosen to fly away rather than stay and eat bread crumbs out of her hand. "Why should they fly?" she cried to her aunt.

"Why? I love them." It is her earliest memory.

In another image Dalia's father stands beside her, his dark wavy hair combed back, his cuffed pants hoisted above his waist, his smile frozen in time by Solia's snap. In the background, behind the lemon tree, Moshe had planted bananas and
guayabas.
To the right, at the edge of the frame, stood a henhouse where the Eshkenazis raised their own chickens. It was the time of the
tsena,
or scarcity (literally "austerity"), and everyone was expected to pitch in.

During the
tsena,
the Ministry of Supply and Rationing moved to the center of Israeli public life. The ministry's job was to regulate the limited supply of food so that no one went hungry. Israel's rapid growth required it to import 85 percent of its food. Although before 1948 the Jewish Agency had direct (if unofficial) trade relations with other states, Israel's sudden entry into the world economy proved jarring. The state had reduced its trade with the markets of the British Empire, and the Arab countries had imposed economic and political boycotts. Egypt was blockading cargo to and from Israel through the Suez Canal, despite a UN resolution calling for free passage through the vital waterway. Israel had to depend on wheat and processed flour, and imported meats, seasonally discounted fish, and even olive oil, from the United States, Canada, and Australia. With the demise of many of the Arab groves, Israel could supply only 8 percent of its own olive oil demands.

In 1950, officials distributed seven hundred thousand live chickens to new immigrants. Milk was stored in dozens of collection stations around the country. The ministry established a Flour Committee and a Bread Committee and directly oversaw the daily production of tens of thousands of round loaves, rolls, and raisin milk cakes. Ration cards linked the address of each family to the serial number of an assigned retailer. Coupon books provided subsidies for wheat, yeast, and matzo and allowed for extra rations of meat for pregnant women. To do their part, citizens were urged to be creative.

The Eshkenazis, like many Israelis during the early 1950s, innovated their way through the scarcity. A neighbor's cow roamed the street unmolested, revered as if the neighborhood were in India, not Israel. Solia bartered for milk and butter from the cow's owner, using eggs from the family's chicken coop as currency. This cow nourished Dalia and all of her neighbors.

In the Ramla market, held on Wednesdays as it had been before July 1948, Dalia would walk with her father, passing by the stalls of cucumbers, olives, and watermelons; past the mounds of oranges and bananas and the hawkers yelling, "Sabra! Sabra!" before the fresh cactus fruit atop buckets of ice; and into the dry goods stores for fabric and shoes. With each purchase, Dalia would watch as her father found top quality without paying too much. "Here," he would say, fingering a pair of trousers for the feel of its fabric. "Compare this"—and he would pick another pair—"to
this."
Always he seemed to find a slight imperfection and negotiate a lower price.

In the evenings, Moshe and Solia would invite Bulgarian friends for gatherings in the backyard. They laid out plates of black olives, watermelon, and Bulgarian cheese, pouring cold glasses of
boza,
a sweet Balkan drink made from wheat. They'd talk of news from Bulgaria, and Dalia would hear them telling off-color jokes in Ladino, the fading language of earlier generations that she could understand only slightly.

Often during these gatherings Dalia would walk to the side of the house, half listening, and inhale from the "candles of the night," the flowers that opened only after sunset. She compared them with Aunt Stella's
margar-itkis
—the white and yellow flowers that would close in the evenings as the night candles opened. Often Solia would put a record on the phonograph, and sultry Spanish music, a legacy of the Eshkenazis' Sephardic roots, would drift out from the house. Dalia would watch her mother and the guests sashay across the veranda that Ahmad Khairi had built, evoking the ballroom days in Sofia when she'd met Moshe. At the end of the evening, Moshe would pick roses from the bushes in the garden and present one to each of the departing women. It was a Bulgarian tradition, and one especially familiar for Solia, who grew up alongside the Valley of the Roses.

By 1955, the year Dalia turned eight, Moshe was rising into the leadership of the local office of the Custodian of Abandoned Properties. Dalia would visit during school vacations, intent on helping her father, answering the phones or showing clients to his office. Usually they were women, often beside themselves with frustration: They had leaks that had needed fixing for months, or after years they still lived in a tent at the edge of town, though they'd been promised better housing. Moshe was genuinely pained by their troubles. He would say, "I am entering your situation," and then explain how his budget was so distressingly limited. He would promise to write appeals to the appropriate ministries, insisting, "I give you my word, I promise to deal with this even if the world turns upside down. . . . " Dalia was amazed to see clients leave the office calmed by the sincere, overwhelmed bureaucrat and hoping for the best. On the street people were constantly approaching Moshe, shaking his hand and thanking him for his help; at other times they would come to his house with gifts. "I understand your gratitude," he would tell them. "I appreciate your gift, but as a public servant I cannot accept it."

On other afternoons, Dalia would stop at the hair salon her aunts Stella and Dora had opened in a narrow storefront of an old Arab shop. All too often, Stella would put her niece in a chair and work on her until Dalia felt she had hardly any hair at all. "Just a little trim . . . there, just a little bit more; you like that, don't you?" Once, when Stella was taking a nap at home, Dalia took her revenge, cutting her aunt's hair as she slept, cooing, "There, just a little bit more; you like that, don't you?" When Stella woke up and looked in the mirror, it seemed she'd been attacked. Stella's brother Daniel was to be married in a few days. She wore a hat to the wedding.

The salon catered mostly to Bulgarians, but the two sisters were gaining a reputation, and soon Polish, Romanian, and Moroccan women would come and the language would switch from Bulgarian to broken French or broken Hebrew. Dalia would recall one regular customer from Poland—unforgettable for her creamy skin and huge blue-green eyes that struck Dalia as especially sad. To Dalia, the woman was every bit as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor. She would sit in her chair, never smiling, gazing out at nothing. Dalia would watch, riveted, as Stella and Dora combed and snipped, doting on the woman, trying to draw her out.

Dalia had begun to notice how some of her neighbors were different. They were silent about the past, where her own family spoke openly about the rescue in Bulgaria. At school, she had a teacher who, it was whispered, had lost his wife and children in the death camps in Poland. Teacher Haim, as everyone called him, had come to Israel after the war. He was Dalia's favorite: a short man with dark, heavy eyebrows and a forehead that took up most of his face. His eyes were hazel, vibrant, and intense, and he walked quickly with a wide gait, rarely slowing, always looking forward. In class he would call to her, to all the children, "Come here,
tachsheet shell,
come here, my jewel, come to the blackboard and show us what you know."

"He gave us a feeling that he believed in our future," Dalia remembered. "He was a strict disciplinarian, but very affirmative. He gave us tools for life."

Many of Dalia's classmates, however, seemed almost beyond reach. The children of Poles, Romanians, and Hungarians, they had come to the country, like Dalia, in the first days of the Israeli state. In the eyes of these children, Dalia saw a vacancy.

A Polish classmate lived next door. His father's eyes were literally bulging out of their sockets in an expression of "permanent incredulity," Dalia would remember, "a fixed stare of terror and horror." For hours at night, over the wall from the inside of another Arab house, Dalia could hear this same man scream at his son, ceaselessly, and she wanted to scream back, "Stop it! Stop it! What do you
want from
him?" Sometimes she actually put her voice to these protests, but she was always drowned out in the din. At school, the silence of this young Polish friend was punctuated occasionally by sudden outbursts of screaming, crying, and kicking. None of the teachers seemed to know what to do with him.

Dalia found this trauma a direct challenge to her faith. Though Moshe and Solia had never been religious—they rarely went to the synagogue and were the essence of "secular Zionists"—Dalia's own belief in God had, she felt, always been a part of her. Few people in Ramla seemed to want to talk about what had happened in Europe during the war, but Dalia had seen the people with numbers on their arms. As she grew older, she learned about the atrocities in Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. She found this truth indigestible.
For God to allow this to happen,
she would recall thinking,
is utterly unconscionable.
She was furious. "You have created human beings!" she would shout to her Creator. "You have to take responsibility for Your creation! You have to be more active in preventing such things!"

Dalia began to understand these horrors as her people's historical legacy. In school she learned of other atrocities. Burned into her mind was a pogrom in the Ukraine, where Jews were slaughtered by sword-wielding Christians after Good Friday mass. She was taught of the silence of European Christians during the Holocaust, especially that of Pope Pius XII, who did not show the courage of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

By the time she went to piano lessons at St. Joseph's Catholic monastery in Ramla, Dalia felt a deep ambivalence about Christianity. It was perhaps 1956; Dalia was soon to turn nine. The heavy cross on the monastery gates reminded her of a sword and invoked an instantaneous fear. Entering the monastery, however, she was drawn in by the silence; by the painted statue of St. Joseph on a pedestal; by the dimly lit corridors with their black and white tiles; and by the portrait of another pope, John XXIII, whose face contained something humane. She began to understand something fundamental. Decades later, she would remember this moment as the beginning of a life of
discernment:
of being able to see the whole and not judge someone or something based simply on a single observation or teaching.

Growing up, Dalia would frequently ask her parents and teachers: "What are these houses we are living in?"

"These are Arab houses," she was told.

"What
are
these Arab houses that everyone talks about?" she would reply.

Dalia's school was in an Arab house, and there she would learn Israel's history. She learned about the creation of the state of Israel as a safe haven for the Jews. She studied the War of Independence as the story of the few against the many. The Arabs had invaded, Dalia would read, in order to destroy the new state and throw the Jews into the sea. Most nations confronted with such hostilities would have been paralyzed, but tiny Israel had withstood five Arab armies. Little David had defeated Goliath. As for the Arabs, Dalia's textbooks would report that they ran away, deserting their lands and abandoning their homes, fleeing before the conquering Israeli army. The Arabs, one textbook of the day declared, "preferred to leave" once the Jews had taken their towns. Dalia accepted the history she was taught. Still, she was confused. Why, she wondered, would anyone leave so willingly?

One afternoon when she was about seven or eight years old, Dalia climbed up the black metal gate that Ahmad Khairi had placed at the end of the stone path in the front yard. Atop the gate perched a delicate piece of wrought iron in the shape of a star and crescent: the symbol of Islam. It bothered Dalia. "This is not an Arab house," she said to herself, and she grasped the delicate crescent and began wrenching it back and forth, back and forth, until it came loose in her hands. She clambered down and threw the crescent away.

In the spring of 1956, when Dalia was in the third grade, she began to make a connection between the Arabs she had learned about in school and those her parents talked about at home. Israeli newspapers were full of stories about raids of infiltrators from Gaza backed by the new Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Moshe read in his evening paper,
Ma yariv,
about the incursions onto Israeli soil by Egyptian and Palestinian fedayeen guerrillas bent on wiping out the Jewish state, and about the swift Israeli responses.