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

by Sandy Tolan

  Yitzhaki had returned from the work camp after the liberation by the Soviet Red Army. Ten days later, he was drafted and sent to the Turkish border. He was based in his hometown of Sliven. "Every week one hundred wagons of food arrived, and I, riding on horseback, would be responsible for the safe arrival of this procession to the Turkish border," he recalled. While awaiting the next caravan of wagons, he would visit his cousin's house, which was filled with boisterous Soviet officers and the entourage of musicians, choirs, and performers that had followed them into Bulgaria. As winter came, and the wagons became stuck in the snow, life became more difficult. By December 1944, when the new Bulgarian army joined the Red Army in the fighting in Austria and Hungary, Yitzhaki's father was worried his son would be placed on the front lines to die in the cold. "My father arrived in Sliven with a plan," Yitzhaki said. "He had dreamed of the land of Israel as far back as the 1930s. Now my father pushed me to the ultimate step: 'You will become our avant garde. We will follow you.'" Yitzhaki's father had connections with the officer in charge of the Sliven headquarters. Soon Yitzhaki was discharged, and near the end of 1944 he quietly left Bulgaria, traveling overland on the Orient Express, the same train Theodor Herzl had ridden half a century earlier, through Istanbul and Syria to Palestine.

  For Ben-Gurion, young men like Yitzhaki were the pioneers for a huge migration to follow. The Zionist leader still had no state, but he had a plan. He knew that Bulgaria was in desperate need of cash and basic goods. He was shocked by the devastation in the capital and the poverty in nearby villages and arranged for temporary aid for the nation's Jews, with a long-term goal of bringing them to a new Jewish state. Upon his return to Palestine, Ben-Gurion ordered that five thousand pairs of shoes be shipped to Bulgaria for its Jewish children, though he added, "Maybe it is a better idea if we try to bring the feet to the shoes."

  A short time later, the Jewish Agency in Palestine opened trade relations with the new Bulgarian government. "Your Excellency," wrote the head of the trade department for the Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv to the Bulgarian minister of commerce, "I take this opportunity to assure you that it is our great desire to commence business relations with Bulgaria, and that every effort will be made on our part to begin transactions as soon as possible." The Jewish Agency, still under British rule in Palestine, had become in many ways a de facto sovereign government.

  At first the Bulgarians and the Jews of Palestine discussed barter deals: Bulgarian pine, beech, and rose oil in exchange for Jewish pharmaceuticals and shoes. "The shoes must have in all exchanges DOUBLE SOLES," one Bulgarian response declared. One kilogram of rose oil, it was proposed, would be worth 160 pairs of shoes. A Jewish Agency minister promised that soon, "ways and means for cash payments" would be found. Pounds sterling was the currency of choice. Before long, the two parties would be discussing Bulgarian dried fruits, strawberry pulp, beehives, blankets, knapsacks, rugs, iron safes, and coal. They signed a trade agreement well before the Jewish state was formally declared.

  Postwar funds for Bulgarian Jews also came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, better known as the JDC, or simply the Joint. In their early work in Bulgaria, JDC officials shipped clothes, blankets, food staples, and medical supplies and helped fund Jewish artists, writers, and artisanal cooperatives. More significant, the JDC had strong ties with the Jewish Agency and with the Mossad, which was organizing the illegal transport of Jews to Palestine in defiance of the British blockades. The JDC's ultimate goal was to help finance the aliyah to the Holy Land.

  Talk of another life in another land tantalized some Bulgarian Jews like Moshe—young men and women who had grown up learning Hebrew and hearing about the dream of Palestine. Jewish support for emigration to Palestine, however, was by no means universal. Many Bulgarian Jews, especially supporters of the Fatherland Front, preferred to rebuild the Jewish community at home. Jewish Communists therefore saw the Zionists as a threat. The political differences often became personal, creating fissures within families: If Ben-Gurion's words stirred something in Moshe, a budding Zionist, they were less appealing to his brother, Jacques, a committed Communist and member of the Fatherland Front.

  On many occasions, Moshe would visit Jacques in his Sofia law office, and the two would discuss politics. The brothers would keep their disagreements private, but given their opposing political views, it is likely Jacques repeated the admonitions of other Jewish Communists to their Zionist brethren: Jews had to join other Bulgarians to rebuild the country from the ruins of war. This was the challenge facing Bulgarian Jews; to leave the fatherland would be to evade the hard, necessary work facing all of Bulgaria. Palestine was a "false Zionist fantasy"; home was here. The new Bulgarian regime, Jacques believed, identified with the struggle against anti-Semitism. The Red Army had fought to save the Jews in Bulgaria. Indeed, the Bulgarian people themselves had fought to save the Jews from annihilation; this alone would be reason for a Jew to take to the streets as a patriotic Bulgarian in a new Communist republic. Jacques, his niece Dalia would recall later, was deeply committed to the dream he had harbored as a Partizan in the mountains.

  By now, Jewish Communists were denouncing the Zionists as "reactionaries" who "don't believe in the Fatherland Front." For Moshe, these attacks could not have been welcome. Moshe was not alone, and soon Bulgarian Jews who opposed Zionism had to concede that they were outnumbered.

  In April 1945, Jewish leaders from the Fatherland Front met in Sofia. They were worried about the Zionist move toward mass emigration to Palestine—in particular, Ben-Gurion's call for aliyah. Todor Zhivkov, the Party activist who would later become head of the Bulgarian state, warned his colleagues that the Zionist organizations had significant financial and political clout because of the support they received from abroad. That summer, Bulgarian Zionists traveled to London for the World Zionist Organization meeting. There, Ben-Gurion repeated his call for the creation of a Jewish state. Three million Jews would be needed to make aliyah in the next five years, he told the assembly. Jacques Eshkenazi wondered how long his brother and Solia would stay in Bulgaria.

  For Moshe and Solia, the decision to stay or to leave remained a difficult one. The promise of Palestine had to be weighed against the prospect of rebuilding their lives with friends and family in Bulgaria. They knew the new government was taking steps to return Jewish property and to punish those responsible for the pro-Fascist policies. Moshe and Solia watched closely.

  Already, People's Court Number Seven had tried Aleksander Belev, the former head of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs and the country's most infamous anti-Semite, and sentenced him to death in absentia. He had escaped Bulgaria near the end of the war. The court had tried and executed Filov, the prime minister under King Boris, and Gabrovski, his interior minister.

  Dimitur Peshev had been spared. The former vice president of the wartime parliament had done more than perhaps anyone to spare Bulgaria's forty-seven thousand Jews; he had pressured Gabrovski to rescind the deportation orders, later denouncing the plan in a public letter in the parliament. During the war, however, Peshev had also pressed Boris's government for the liquidation of the Partizans in the hills. The quiet bachelor was given fifteen years at hard labor; he would be released after three.

  Hundreds of others would not be so lucky. As Moshe worked to reestablish himself as a salesman of fine garments, and he and Solia began planning for a family, they were well aware that a few blocks away, at the people's court, the prosecutions were intensifying. The court began to execute pro-Fascist cabinet members, parliamentarians, collaborators, and alleged collaborators by the hundreds; by the spring of 1945, more than 2,100 people had been put to death. Many more were tortured or sentenced to hard labor for their association with the pro-Fascist government.

  In November 1945, Georgi Dimitrov came home to Bulgaria. The Communist and anti-Fascist hero had spent the past two decades in the Kremlin. After parliamentary elections, he became president of Bulgaria. Soon he began a series of propert
y seizures. Already the leadership of the Fatherland Front, with its espousal of collective ownership, had been reluctant to return all Jewish property to its owners. The Communist leadership was interested in eliminating bourgeois communities, not reinstating them. With the return of Dimitrov, collectives and cooperatives began replacing grocers, craftsmen, and merchants. Moshe, Solia, and other Jewish families whose modest commerce relied on private enterprise now had another factor weighing in favor of emigration to Israel. But a central question remained: Would they be allowed to go? A few months later, an answer came.

  In May 1947, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, stunned Zionists, the United States, and Great Britain by suggesting in a speech to the General Assembly that the Soviet Union would support a Jewish state in Palestine. A week later, delighted Sofia Jews expressed their gratitude for Gromyko's speech in a telegram to Stalin. 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, celebrations broke out in cities across Bulgaria. This was the same news that the Khairis had greeted with shock and disbelief in al-Ramla. In Sofia, joyous Jews took to the streets to wave flags, sing songs of Israel, and brandish placards bearing the names of the heroes of the day: Theodor Herzl, Georgi Dimitrov, David Ben-Gurion, and Joseph Stalin.

  Three days after the UN vote on December 2, 1947, Solia Eshkenazi gave birth to Dalia (then called Daizy) in a Sofia hospital. Jacques and his wife, Virginia, visited Moshe and Solia shortly after the couple brought the baby home from the hospital. Virginia would remember an unusually beautiful child, quiet and peaceful—unlike her father, who could not contain his joy. Nor did he want to. "There is a girl, and her name is Daizy!" Moshe would exclaim as he darted excitedly between an exhausted mother and their child in her straw basket. "There is a girl, and her name is Daizy!" The couple had wanted a child for seven years; they had even hoped for a girl. Now they had to decide where she would grow up.

  The new Soviet support for a Jewish state meant the Bulgarian government would back emigration for those Jews wishing to leave. Georgi Dimitrov had just returned from a meeting in the Kremlin, where Stalin had reminded him, "To help the Jews emigrate to Palestine is the decision of the United Nations." Dimitrov immediately conveyed this message to Jewish Communists who saw the UN partition vote as a defeat. "The Jewish people, for the first time in their history, are fighting like men for their rights," Dimitrov told his Jewish comrades in a Politburo meeting in March 1948. "We must admire this fight. . . . We used to be against emigration. We were actually an obstacle to it. Which made us isolated from the masses."

  A few weeks later, on May 3, Jewish Communists publicly declared "with a great feeling of boundless appreciation the great contribution of the Great Soviet Union for the solution of the Jewish problem and the achievement of an independent, free, democratic Jewish Republic—Eretz Yisrael. . . . Long live the People's Republic of Bulgaria and the leader of the Bulgarian people, the relentless fighter against Fascism and anti-Semitism, comrade Gheorghi Dimitroff. Long live the protector of the enslaved and oppressed nations, Generalissimuss Iossif Vissarionovitch Stalin."

  As for the impending departure of so many of the nation's Jews, the Jewish Communists resolved "with satisfaction that the Government of the People's Republic of Bulgaria gives full opportunities to those Jews who desire to settle in Palestine to immigrate freely." This was the position Jacques Eshkenazi would also adopt; how he felt about it, and what he told Moshe, died with the two brothers.

  The Fatherland Front now controlled all efforts to move Jews wanting to leave the country. Bulgarian Zionist groups would no longer be allowed to work independently. There would be only one Jewish newspaper, run by the government. Zionists and Communists would share the same goal—to facilitate the departure of those Jews who wished to emigrate to the new state of Israel.

  Some recall it as a chain reaction, others as a deliberate, joyous step toward an ancient homeland, others as a fever. For years, the decision to emigrate seemed theoretical. Even after it became possible, many said they planned to stay. That changed quickly. A neighbor, Israel the barber, decided to take his family on an early ship. Then Rahel, the housewife across the street, announced her family was leaving. A cousin, Sami the electrician, made aliyah. Then Matilda the tailor was gone. Leon the shoemaker. Haim the police officer. Isak the driver. Buko the cinematographer. Now the rabbi. The grocer. The fruit peddler. The bread maker. The Bulgarian Jewish choir—all one hundred of them—away, together, on a boat to Israel. Suddenly half of the family was gone, half the neighborhood empty. "It was like a psychosis," remembered a former Communist, a Jew who chose to stay in Bulgaria. "In the evening they believed in something. The next morning they believed in something else."

  For Moshe and Solia, by the spring of 1948 there was little left to debate. Hard times showed few signs of lifting. Factories had been nationalized and property seized for the state; Moshe's future livelihood was unclear. The new government, although it seemed to treat Jews and other Bulgarians equally, had in its tortures and executions demonstrated what Moshe saw as an excessive brutality; the near escape in 1943, moreover, was no guarantee of safety in some unknown future Bulgaria.

  For Moshe, though, it was not simply that prospects of a harsh life in Bulgaria were a disincentive to stay; it was that he wanted to arrive in someplace new. Moshe had spent most of his years hearing about a new life in a distant place. He thrived on challenges and trusted his instincts, which in this case told him to go.

  Solia was less sure. Leaving behind a beloved country weighed heavily on her. As Moshe's wife, however, she would follow his lead: As soon as they could, Moshe, Solia, and Dalia Eshkenazi would move to Israel.

  By May 14, as Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence and the war between the Arabs and the Jews officially began, the Jewish Agency and the Bulgarian government had already drawn up detailed plans for an orderly emigration. First there would be five small ships carrying 150 people each—people whose children, like Yitzhak Yitzhaki, had gone to Palestine during the mandate and whose presence there was the first pull on the chain of migration. These trips would be paid for by the JDC, at about $40 per person, on ships owned and piloted by the Bulgarian merchant marine. The participation of the JDC and other international Zionist organizations would be tolerated, provided they continued to come up with the hard currency still desperately needed to rebuild a devastated and impoverished Bulgaria.

  The first big operation, the Bulgarian government decided, would be arranged through the port of Bakar in Yugoslavia. A total of 3,694 Bulgarian Jews would have about three weeks to get their affairs in order. Before leaving, they would be required to submit to medical examinations to certify they were free of tuberculosis, heart disease, typhoid, cholera, and syphilis. Then they would close their homes, say good-bye, and assemble on October 25 at the central railway station in Sofia, where two long trains would be waiting.

  Moshe and Solia moved forward in the crush of passengers on the platform at the Sofia station. Jacques and his wife, Virginia, had come to say goodbye. They helped Moshe and Solia with the boxes and suitcases; someone was carrying Dalia, placid in her straw basket. The atmosphere was heavy with sorrow and buoyant with expectation; brothers and fathers and grandmothers and uncles knew they would be embracing for perhaps the last time.

  The air was sharp and bright. South of the platform, the crest of Vitosha mountain rose up, its jagged crown off center like the peak of a rumpled hat. There Solia had often taken fellowship with groups of young friends, singing their way up steep, stony trails through pines and maples filtering afternoon sun. Well to the east lay her home country of Sliven, just beyond the Valley of the Roses, where she would recall her old yard with its apricot tree. It was a country of coal nestled deep in the hills. The soil there was good for fruit trees and for red wine grapes. Solia would remember the winds that whistled down the gorges, raising clouds
of dust in her native town.

  The train left Sofia in the afternoon, moving slowly, tentatively at first, then picking up speed as it puffed and clacked west, whistling out of the capital, toward the border of Yugoslavia and a boat bound for Israel.

  For many of the 1,800 Bulgarian Jews on the train from Sofia—or the tens of thousands of Hungarian, Romanian, or Polish Jews emigrating in the fall of 1948—the journey to Israel represented a return after two thousand years of exile, a chance to fulfill the Talmudic promise "He who makes four steps in Israel, all his sins will be forgiven."

  But the train crossing the Yugoslav border at dusk on October 25, 1948, also represented a triumph for a movement critics once dismissed as folly. Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, knew that establishing a Jewish national home meant forging alliances with the imperial powers. They would need to be convinced that a Jewish state, in Palestine or perhaps elsewhere, would be in their interests. "Moses needed forty years," Herzl declared. "We require perhaps twenty or thirty."

  Herzl courted the Ottoman sultan, whose faltering empire was still in control of Palestine. The Zionist leader promised financial backing from "my friends on all the stock exchanges of Europe" to help alleviate the empire's debt and build a new bridge "high enough for the largest warships to pass beneath and enter the Golden Horn." The sultan responded favorably, declaring himself "a friend of the Jews." On his way back from Istanbul, Herzl stopped in Sofia and told a Bulgarian acquaintance: "The Sultan needs money and we need a homeland. I am leaving for Vienna, London and Paris in order to collect the necessary sum of money."

  Herzl also looked to Britain for support. He urged the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, to support "a Jewish colony in a British possession." Britain would thus "gain an increase of her power and the gratitude often million Jews." According to Herzl, Chamberlain "liked the Zionist idea. If I could show him a spot among the British possessions which was not yet inhabited by white settlers, then we could talk." Britain was not yet in control of Palestine, so the two men discussed a possible Jewish homeland in Cyprus, Sinai, or even Uganda. "It is hot on the coast," Chamberlain told the Zionist leader, "but the climate of the interior is excellent for Europeans. Sugar and cotton can be raised there."