Sandy Tolan est un enseignant et producteur de documentaires radio dont le travail explore souvent l'intersection de la race, du sport et des héros américains. Son parcours littéraire, nourri par des reportages approfondis dans plus de 30 pays, plonge au cœur des complexités du Moyen-Orient. En tant que cofondateur de Homelands Productions et journaliste chevronné, Tolan met à profit ses talents pour révéler des récits nuancés. Son approche allie recherche méticuleuse et narration captivante, faisant de ses œuvres des explorations perspicaces de l'expérience humaine.
In the summer of 1967, not long after the Six Day War, three young Palestinian men ventured into the town of Ramla in Israel. Dalia, who arrived in 1948 as an infant with her family, as a fugitive from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust.
In 1967, a twenty-five-year-old refugee named Bashir Khairi traveled from the Palestinian hill town of Ramallah to Ramla, Israel, with a goal: to see the beloved stone house with the lemon tree in its backyard that he and his family had been forced to leave nineteen years earlier. When he arrived, he was greeted by one of its new residents: Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student whose family had fled Europe following the Holocaust. She had lived in that house since she was eleven months old. On the stoop of this shared house, Dalia and Bashir began a surprising friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and later tested as political tensions ran high and Israelis and Palestinians each asserted their own right to live on this land. Adapted from the award-winning adult book and based on Sandy Tolan's extensive research and reporting, The Lemon Tree is a deeply personal story of two people seeking hope, transformation, and home.