Returning to HaifaBy: Ghassan Kanafani

Outline

1 -Some hints about the play.2 -The Author.

3 -Short summary of the play.4 -About the Cameri theater.

5 -Characters.6 -About the city of Haifa

7 -Some images of Haifa today & in the past.8 -Themes in the play.

9 -Picture timeline.10 -Some quotations.

11 -Some critical views about the play.12 -Short Video.

Some hints about the play

#Adopted from the novella by Ghassan Kanafani.

#Translated from the Hebrew by Margalit Rodgers and Anthony Berris.

# This play was directed by Israeli director Sinai Peter and many of Israeli’s most prominent Israeli and Arab – Israeli actors.

# It played for audiences first in Jaffa, Israel, and then at the Cameri’s theater in Tel_ Aviv.

The Author*Ghassan kanafani, the famous Palestinian journalist, novelist and

short story writer, was born in Acre in the north of Palestine on April and lived in Jaffa until May 1948.

*When the Arab – Israeli war started, Kanafani fled with his family

first to Lebanon and then to Syria, when they settled as refugees.

*After finishing his secondary education, he studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus, during which time he joined the Arab Nationalist Party.

*He died in 1972 when his tapped car exploded, killing him and his niece in Beirut.

*Kanafani has published eighteen books and written hundreds of articles on culture, politics and the Palestinian people’s struggle.

*Some of his works: The novella ‘’ Men in the sun’’ in 1962 ,‘’All that’s left to you.’’

Short Summary of the PlayGhassan Kanafani‘s novella, Returning to Haifa (1969), tells

the story of Sa’id and Safeyya, who fled their home in Haifa during the 1948 Nakba.

In the chaos and violence of their escape, their five-month old son Khaldun is left behind. Twenty years later when the Mandelbaum Gate is opened they return to Haifa, “to see” as they tell themselves.

They find their home occupied by Miriam, a widow whose husband died in the war eleven years earlier, and Dov, their son Khaldun, an officer dressed in an Israeli military uniform.

The narrative thrust of the story follows their visit and the conversation that goes on between Sa’id, Safeyya, Miriam and Dov/Khaldun, with flashbacks into their pasts and a retelling of the events of 1948, twenty years earlier.

The Cameri Theater of Tel- Aviv

The Cameri, Tel Aviv’s Theater, was founded in 1944 .

It is Israeli’s biggest theater and of the country’s six public theatres.

Characters 1 -Sa’id:

A Palestinian who lived with his wife and infant son in the house where he grew up in Haifa, until Haifa became a conflict zone between Arab- Palestinians and Jews in 1948. Sa’id with his wife fled to live in Ramallah in East Jerusalem.

2 -Saffiyeh:A Palestinian, Sa’id’s wife. On the day her husband was fighting for control of Haifa. She went out to look for him but was swept away in the masses of Arabs fleeing the city. She could not return for her infant son, Khaldun, whom she left in the house. She and Sa’id has another son and

daughter, in Ramallah .

3 -Mariam:A Palestinian- Jew, Mariam used to write for Hebrew newspapers. She moved to Israel after World War 2, having lost her only son in Holocaust. When she and her husband were granted the home in Haifa, they agreed to raise the child that officials found in the house as their own.

4 -Ephraim:A Palestinian – Jew, Mariam’s husband. He has worked as an accountant in Poland. He is unaccustomed to working in the harsh

sun in Israel, and dies before his wife .

5 -Artzi:An official at the Jewish Agency, he helps Ephraim and Mariam get a house in Haifa. He makes a deal with Ephraim, giving him a home in Haifa if he agrees to raise an abandoned child.

6 -Dov:Mariam and Ephraim’s 20 – year – old adopted son, now a paratrooper in the Israeli Army. He was born ‘’ Khaldun’’ by his birth parents, renamed ‘’Dov’’ by Ephraim and Mariam.

About the city of Haifa

*Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel, and the third – largest city in the country , with a population of over 265,000.

* It is suggested that ‘’ Haifa’’ is related to the Hebrew words ‘’ Hof Yafe’’, which means ‘’ beautiful coast.’’

*Haifa’s history has been set around its strategic location on a natural harbor on the Mediterranean sea .

Images of Haifa Today

Images of Haifa in 1948

Main Themes: Law of Return &

Right of Return*One of the underlying questions at the

heart of the play and novella ‘’Returning to Haifa’’ is ‘’ Where is home for Sa’id and

Saffieyh’’?

* Two definitions to understand this situation:

Law of Return

The Law of return was adopted by a unanimous vote of the Knesset ( the unicameral parliament of Israel ) on July, 1950 .

It gives any Jew the automatic right to enter and live in Israel.

Since then, well over 2 million immigrants have come to Israel under its provisions, fulfilling, in to small measure, the ancient

dream of the ( ingathering of the exiles) .

This refers to the Palestinian assertion that refugees who left Israel in 1948 and during later conflicts have a moral and legal right to return to what was once Palestine – including land which is now Israel.

It states that Palestinian ‘’refugees’’ wishing to return to their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date.

Right of Return

Pictures timeline: A history of Israel

and the Palestinian Territories

A map of the land of Canaan

Ottoman Palestine

An early Jewish settlement

Shifting Stands

Babies born on a kibbutz in the 1920s.

A map of the proposed partition of Palestine

Declaration of the state of Israel

PLO leader Yasser Arafat addressing Palestinian Children

The Mandelbaum Gate seperated East and west Jerusalem .

Eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Olympics in 1972

The Intifada was meant to send a message to both the PLO & Israel.

The famous handshake between the then PLO leader, Yasser Arafat & Yitzhak Rabin , the then Israeli prime minister, at the Clinton white house in 1993.

The funeral of Yitzhak Rabin

A scene from the second Intifada

The Cameri Theatre and Tel Aviv Opera house.

Some Quotations

“When he reached the edge of Haifa, approaching by car along the Jerusalem road, Said S. had the sensation that something was binding his tongue, compelling him to keep silent, and he feIt grief well

up inside of him .The story starts with this quotation. We find two themes which Kanafani returns to repeatedly. The first, is the exile longing to resurrect a dead past and to see things as thought he had never been away and nothing had ever changed since he had. The second is, how insensible things , like memory, have acquired the images of violence and conflict.

“You know, for twenty long years I always imagined that the Mandelbaum Gate would be opened some day, but I never, never imagined that it would be opened from the other side. It never entered my mind. So when they were the ones to open it, it seemed to me frightening and absurd and to a great

degree humiliating .

This quotation is said by Saffiyeh to her husband Sa’id .

We understand that Sa’id and Saffiyeh have a conviction that their exile is temporary and their return imminent.

“What Khaldnn, Safiyya? What Khaldun? What flesh and blood are you talking about? You say this is a fair choice? They’ve taught him how to be for twenty years, day by day, hour by hour, with his food, his drink, his sleep. And you say, a fair choice! Truly Khaldun, or Dov, or the devil if you like, doesn’t know us! Do you want to know what I think? Let’s get out of here and return to the past. The matter is finished. They

stole him.“

This quotation is said by Sa’id to his wife Saffieyeh. This situation happens when Dov denies all the ties with his biological parents. As a result,

Saffieyeh becomes shocked .

According to one critic about the play

1-" Returning to Haifa" is certainly one of the best works of the Palestinian literary master Ghassan Kanafani.

2- This translation contains, in addition to the title novella, a selection of Kanafani's short stories relating to children - Palestinian children.

3- A major feature of "Returning to Haifa" is the seamless melding of two narratives, as a Palestinian family expelled from Haifa in 1948 return for the first time to see their former home after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967.

  Giant Panda

Short Video