As soon as you begin to read Ilil Arbel's masterpiece, "The Lemon Tree", you start to feel the presence of a superb writer who has unveiled the intimate secrets of conversing with the depth of the soul and the warmth of a parallel world of beauty and love  which dissipated in joyfully morose and cherished memories. Arbel's tender, heart felt and nostalgic style echoes the drama of Tolstoy and charming eloquence of Victor Hugo. The inner world of Tolstoy bursts in war and peace. The external world of Hugo explodes within fragile tableaux of human drama, romantic visions and half human, half divine lyricism. In her book, Arbel blends both, the human lava of Tolstoy and the enchanting world of the family, the loved ones, the painful memory of  a lost child, the shadow of a hard destiny which still haunts  those who survived tyranny and horror, and perhaps, just perhaps the sadness they feel, for they are unable now to share moments of joy and peace with the loved ones who are no longer around...This was the world of the man who wrote "Les Miserables", and Hugo's world takes form and place in the writings of Arbel.

The past is romantic, but no one wants to live it again. In Arbel's book, the past continues on a different path. It is a joyful one, a hopeful road of life, despite the hard time, the suffering, the constant threat of typhoid fever and horrible deceases without cure,  facing arrest at Port Said, the fear of being shot by Manchurian officials for smuggling "a few necessities of life", and desperately chasing runway trains, her parents went through, suffered from and barely made it to the promised land. Arbel wrote about all these unpleasant and  horrifying events her parents experienced and suffered from. However, the sweetness and lyrical warmth of her style, the way she described how Marusia, Ilil family's nanny was concerned about Ida,  (Ilil's mother)  frozen nose, because Siberia's icy weather, where Ilil's parent previously lived, had no mercy on humans, and how papa used to rub her frozen nose with snow and goose fat, while hugging her. You will be touched by the simplistic, yet majestically eloquent and descriptive style of Arbel which brought back the memories of taking trips to the woods to collect bluebells and wild berries, skating on the Siberian ice,  building huge snowmen with coal eyes, traveling in troikas,  pushing their "child-size sleds",  running madly with exuberant joy and innocence, jumping to lie on them and " traveling for unbelievable distances on the uninterrupted sheets of ice, feeling as if they were flying."