The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (12 page)

White crusts formed around everyone's mouths. How far was Salbit? Were they still going in the right direction? They were always looking for shade and water. They crossed fields of corn, where they plucked ripe ears and sucked the moisture out of the kernels. Firdaws saw a boy peeing into a can and then watched his grandmother drink from it. A man had slung his father over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and Firdaws, for a time, carried someone's baby in her arms.

It was late afternoon, and they had been walking for hours over rocky terrain with no clear idea anymore how to find the village of Salbit. Their rambling journey would turn out to be much longer than four kilometers. Some would say twelve; others would swear it was twenty.

The Khairis and the Tajis began to shed their belongings. Some had actually begun the walk with suitcases; these had been discarded long ago. After a time someone found a well, but the rope was broken. Women removed their dresses, lowered them into the stagnant water, and lifted them back up, placing the fabric to their children's lips so they could suck on the wet cloth.

Perhaps thirty thousand people from al-Ramla and Lydda staggered through the hills that day.

John Bagot Glubb heard the reports. The British commander of the Arab Legion knew it was "a blazing day in the coastal plains, the temperature about a hundred degrees in the shade." He knew that the refugees were crossing "stony fallow covered with thorn bushes" and that, in the end, "nobody will ever know how many children died." Still, Glubb would insist until his death that he didn't have sufficient forces to defend al-Ramla and Lydda; that to do so would have required pulling his troops from the front lines at Latrun and possibly losing everything: Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarm, East Jerusalem, Abdullah's entire prize of the West Bank—an act that "would have been madness."

On July 15, before the march from al-Ramla and Lydda was over, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: "The Arab Legion has wired that there are 30,000 refugees moving along the road between Lydda and Ramla, who are infuriated with the Legion. They're demanding bread. They should be taken across the Jordan River"—into Abdullah's kingdom and away from the new state of Israel.

In the evening, the Tajis and Khairis came to a grove of fig trees in the village of Salbit. The village was nearly abandoned, except for the hundreds of refugee families resting in the orchards.

Firdaws and her family took shelter under the trees. Someone brought water. She noticed that her mother had one of the two cloth sacks—the vitamins, Firdaws assumed. But it was the water pipe.

That night, the family sat under the fig trees, smoking quietly, the bubbles gurgling in the glass canister.

The next morning, trucks from the Arab Legion took the Khairis and the Tajis to Ramallah. They reached the crest of a hill just west of the city. Below them lay a vast bowl: the valley of Ramallah. The city had long been a Christian hill town and cool summer haven for Arabs from the Levant to the Gulf.

Now tens of thousands of refugees milled about, stunned and humiliated, looking for food and determined to return home.

Five

EMIGRATION

S
UNLIGHT FILTERED THROUGH the narrow windowpanes of Sofia's central rail station, casting a hazy glow on the hundreds of Jewish passengers packed inside the waiting hall. It was October 1948, three months after Israeli forces entered al-Ramla. As the Khairis waited in Ramallah a thousand miles to the south, listening for news in the ongoing war for Palestine, Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi inched forward in the long line of Bulgarian Jews in the train station. Solia wore a long skirt and a tailored jacket to match, and her dark hair spilled over her shoulders from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Many passengers wore dark coats and heavy shoes and stood surrounded by boxes and suitcases. Moshe held the family's identity papers. He was short and square, with the dark olive skin, high cheekbones, and black, deep-set eyes of many Sephardic Jews. Beside them lay their infant, Dalia, asleep in her straw basket.

Moshe and Solia had met eight years earlier, just before Bulgaria entered its alliance with the Nazis. Moshe liked to tell Solia, and later Dalia, that when he'd first seen his future bride at a party, she was ravishing and vibrant, in a ballroom dress, ready to dance. He'd thought,
Now here is someone for my friend Melamed,
the doctor. Moshe had approached the young beauty, but after a few minutes of conversation, he'd thought,
What about me?
Within days they were on their first date, and Moshe wasted no time: He informed Solia of his intention to marry her. She dismissed the remark with a laugh, but Moshe was undaunted. "It will take as long as it takes," he vowed, "but I will marry you."

At long tables at the front of the lines sat uniformed Bulgarian immigration police. One by one, 3,694 Jews prepared to show their papers and open their suitcases for inspection for hidden cash or gold. They were allowed to take nothing of value, but some travelers had sewn jewels inside their underwear, or strapped French gold coins, known as napoleons, to their bodies. They were not planning to return: When they reached the immigration tables, they would sign documents saying that from this day forward, they would no longer be citizens of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Later that day, they would board two long trains and ride to the coast of Yugoslavia, where a ship, the
Pan York,
would be waiting to take them to the new state of Israel.

Moshe and Solia were part of a history unlike any other in Europe. They knew that, like nearly everyone else in the railway station, they were lucky just to be alive. Solia believed that were it not for the decency of so many Gentiles in Bulgaria—and particularly of a handful of people who chose to act in early 1943—she and Moshe could have been on a train to Treblinka, not waiting to board a ship with their infant daughter for a new life in the Jewish state.

The
Pan York
would sail on October 28, 1948—three days hence, and after years of deliberation that had brought them to this moment of departure.

More than five years had passed since the night in March 1943 when Moshe and Solia waited in Sliven for the deportation that never came. King Boris died later that year, and in the summer of 1944, with the arrival of the Soviet Red Army, Bulgaria's alliance with the Nazis crumbled. Bulgaria's Partizan fighters, including Moshe's brother, Jacques, and many of Susannah Behar's friends, came down from the Rhodope and Balkan Mountains, and soon Bulgaria's anti-Fascist parties forged a left-Democratic governing coalition, the Fatherland Front. Moshe and Solia returned to Sofia and began to organize their lives. Some Jews dreamed of the new Bulgarian state they would help build after Fascism, but others were already thinking about Palestine.

Zionism, the political movement devoted to the emigration of European Jews to the Holy Land, had taken hold in Bulgaria in the early 1880s, just as the nation freed itself from the Ottoman "yoke." In 1895, an early Zionist paper published in Plovdiv broached the idea that Jews could "arrange their life in Syria and Palestine by settling in the field for agricultural work." The next year, Bulgarian Jews established Har Tuv, one of the earliest Zionist settlements in Palestine. That same June, Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader, stopped in Sofia en route to Istanbul on the
Orient Express,
to a triumphant reception at the train station. Herzl, whose book
The Jewish State
laid out the vision of a "Promised Land" where "we can live as free men on our own soil," was already a hero to Jews in Bulgaria. "I was hailed as Leader, as the Heart of Israel, etc. in extravagant terms," Herzl wrote in his diary. "I stood there, I believe, altogether dumbfounded, and the passengers of the
Orient Express
stared at the unusual spectacle with astonishment."

Herzl believed Europe did not want the Jews, and he argued for a Jewish state "where we can have hooked noses, black or red beards, and bandy legs, without being despised for it . . . where we can die tranquilly in our homeland . . . where we shall live at peace with all the world. . . . So that the derisive cry of 'Jew!' may become an honorable appellation, like German, Englishman, Frenchman—in short, like that of all civilized peoples." In much of Europe, including among Jewish intellectuals and even some rabbis, Herzl's ideas were dismissed as Utopian or dangerous; he was called "the Jewish Jules Verne" and a "crazy careerist." In Bulgaria, however, Herzl was praised as "the new apostle of the new Jewish nationalism."

On his way back from Istanbul, where he had sought support from the Ottoman Empire to establish a Jewish state, Herzl stopped in Sofia again. "Sensation throughout the town," he wrote. "Hats and caps thrown in the air. I had to request that a parade be dispensed with. . . . Later I had to go to the synagogue, where hundreds were awaiting me. . . . I stood in the pulpit before the Holy Ark. When I hesitated for a moment as to how to face the congregation without turning my back to the Ark, someone exclaimed: 'You may turn your back even to the Ark. You are holier than the Torah.' Several wanted to kiss my hand." An amazed Herzl warned against demonstrations "and advised a calm demeanor lest popular passions be aroused against the Jews."

Talk of a return to Zion went on for several decades in the pages of prewar Zionist newspapers in Bulgaria. Arabs already living on the land did not figure in these discussions, and some Bulgarian Jews would recall reading about the "land without people for a people without land." Debates in these pages centered on whether Jews should learn Hebrew in preparation for emigration to Palestine or stay with Ladino, the Judeo Spanish mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews. Moshe became fluent in Hebrew through a Socialist-Zionist organization called Hashomer Hatza'ir (the Young Guard). Solia was content with her Ladino and its proverbs learned at the hearth and in the kitchen.

The Zionist papers were shut down after the 1941 anti-Jewish Law for the Defense of the Nation. By October 1944, however, less than a month after the liberation from the pro-Fascist regime, Bulgarian Zionists had already begun to regroup. Organizers of local committees sent official greetings to the Fatherland Front; then they established the Palestinski Komitet, which advocated aliyah, or Jewish emigration to Palestine. Their goal was to make aliyah a mass movement among Bulgarian Jews.

For Moshe and Solia and many of their neighbors, the prospect of emigration had at first seemed remote. Their families lived here; their work was here; even after what happened in 1943, they were still Bulgarian. For many Bulgarians, Jews included, the defeat of the Nazis meant that the sacrifice of the Partizans in the Rhodope and Balkan Mountains had not been for naught. Moshe's brother, Jacques, believed that with the Communists in power for the first time in Bulgaria, an egalitarian society could finally be built. Moshe wasn't so sure; for one thing, the country was still suffering from the recent war.

Bulgaria was a devastated landscape. American bombings in late 1943 and early 1944 had flattened much of Sofia, including the parliament building. The relentless blitzes killed many and drove residents into the countryside. Villages were overrun with refugees. Crop failures brought food shortages and hunger, and runaway inflation deepened the crisis. By the late fall of 1944, the new, impoverished government had begun to look beyond its borders for help.

On December 2, less than three months after the country's liberation, David Ben-Gurion arrived in the Bulgarian capital. The leader of the Zionists in Palestine was received by the Bulgarian prime minister, the foreign, interior, and propaganda ministers, and Metropolitan Stefan, the Bulgarian Orthodox bishop, who at substantial personal risk had stood up for the nation's Jews during the war. The central goal of his meeting was to win their agreement to allow Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Rehabilitating the Jews of Bulgaria would be impossible, he told the officials; they had to be allowed to leave. Establishing a Jewish state, Ben-Gurion told the Jews and state dignitaries packed into the Balkan Theatre in Sofia, was "the task of the moment." "Aliyah!" came cries from the audience. By the end of the year, more than 1,300 Jews had left Bulgaria en route to Palestine. One of them, Solia's cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, was the first in the family to leave.

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.