عائد إلى حيفا

First published in 1969, Ghassan Kanafani's short novel opens in 1968, when the border between Israel and the occupied West Bank is briefly opened. Said and his wife Safiyya drive from Ramallah back to Haifa, the city they fled during the violence of April 1948 — and to the house they were forced to abandon in the chaos, along with their infant son Khaldun.

The couple find their old home occupied by Miriam, a Jewish woman who survived Europe and was resettled there, and who raised the child they left behind. That child is now Dov, a young man in the uniform of the Israeli army. The novel unfolds largely as the charged conversation among these four people, threaded with flashbacks to the day of the family's flight two decades earlier.

Remarkably even-handed toward everyone caught in its story, Returning to Haifa is one of the defining works of modern Palestinian literature. Through a single wrenching reunion, Kanafani examines homeland, memory, and belonging, and reframes what it means to claim — and to fight for — a place and a people. He was assassinated a few years after its publication.