Customer Reviews

The Lemon Tree

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The Lemon Tree is not just another biography. It reads like a novel, where you enter a rich, full world through the eyes of the narrator, yet this world had really existed out there in the past. You can feel almost as though you have become part of it, and all the characters, places and events come alive.

The travels and tribulations of the pioneer family are told from a very unique point of view, that of a sensitive little girl. The girl is aware of what is happening through all her senses, and you can actually feel what it was like to go through all these experiences. Look, for example, how she describes the dangerous moment of reaching the Manchurian border: "We were received by a very tall woman, dressed entirely in black. She even wore a black fur hat, like hats of the Cossacks. Over her forehead peeked a few gray hairs and her face was wrinkled, not with friendly laugh lines around the eyes, but with vicious lines, pointing down around her mouth. She smelled of mildew, and reminded me of Baba Yaga, the horrible witch that ate little children in the Russian fairy tales." You can see, smell and feel how the scary world of real events was!

This book presents a very interesting point of view of a family of pioneers, hardened by all the hardships they went through, yet still warm and loving, not blinded by their idealism.

This is the kind of material that was missing when I learned history. I should have had access not only to dates and events, but to the experience of real people who lived in these periods.

The Lemon Tree is many books rolled into a mere eighty-seven pages: true-life thrilling adventure; saga of a family's love and courage; window into a time and culture now largely lost; engrossing first-person historical account. All is told from the perspective of an innocent child, letting the reader imagine the staggering fears and dreams of the parents.

The Wissotzky's, a Jewish family living in semi-exile in Siberia shortly after the Russian Revolution, suffer the loss of their oldest child - and then find themselves once more a political target. They undertake a desperate journey full of danger and great hardship to reach Palestine, their longed-for promised land. Through the poignantly simple observations of seven-year-old Ida, we experience months in a vermin-infested cattle car, the terrors of police inspections that might well lead to being summarily shot, the fairy-tale enchantment of Shanghai and the cruel dashing of hope by an Egyptian bureaucracy.

Finally arriving in Tel Aviv, the Wissotzky's join a Jewish settlement of refugees who have lost everything in a material sense, but are amazingly rich in education, culture and the joys of family and community. It must have seemed like Paradise to them, and indeed, it sounds so to me as well.

This little book can be read very quickly, but its story will stay with the reader as a testament to the worth of family, community, and of daring to follow a dream.

Susan Prudhomme
Author of The Wisdom of Ambrose

The Lemon Tree is a wonderful, pleasant recollection of the early memories of Ida Rosenfeld, specifically of her warm, loving family's happy life in Siberia until pain enters it through the death of her brother Sasha. His life was never quite extinguished, though, because he had planted a lemon seed that he'd plucked out of his warm tea, and his family lovingly and faithfully nurtured it as the best representation of their faith and hope. The time came when they had to leave their happy life in Siberia and set out as a pioneering family bound for Israel, a destination they had longed for, but getting there was an arduous and sometimes frightening experience. But children are often blessed with the ability to see delight in even the greatest struggles, and it is through Ida's eight-year-old eyes that we see the wonder of Shanghai during the month they stopped over there, and then their new hometown, Tel Aviv, Israel.

When they get settled in, the family plants the little lemon tree, and it becomes a symbol of all their hope, determination, and dreams fulfilled. This book left me wanting to know more of Ida's story, especially as she becomes a teenager and young woman, and goes off to university in France where she will meet her future husband. I especially loved all the rich details in the descriptions of Tel Aviv when it was still a small town in the early 1920s. It made me want to just pack my bags and go there.

Reading this gives a better perspective of the Isreal Palestine conflict. It could only be written by an Israeli. Both sides have legitimate concerns but only the Palestinians have lost their land and country. Most of what we read is distorted through the pro Isreal and pro Palestine sides without looking at the effect that this conflict has had on the citizens of both.