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 discovered a wallet in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, in 1943. Wearing a yellow star that marked him as a Jew, he turned the wallet in at the police station, where a senior policeman told him there was a plan afoot to deport the Jews and said that Moshe should clear out. Moshe took 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 powers. The 47,000 Jews in Bulgaria had heard the horrific tales of what was happening to Jews elsewhere in Europe, and laws modeled on the Nuremberg laws in Germany had taken away their rights.

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