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Returning to Haifa
By: 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
playGhassan Kanafani.
#Adopted from the novella by
#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 Play
Ghassan 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.

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).

Right of
Return
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.

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.

Declaration of the state of Israel
A map of the proposed partition of Palestine

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
Giant Panda
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.

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Returning to haifa

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