“Return to Haifa” is the largest story in this collection and one of his most famous. It is an incredible story, both stylistically and thematically. It tells the story of a Palestinian man and his young wife who were forced as refugees from Haifa in the 1948 War. During the panic, they were separated from each other and from their 5-month old baby, Khaldun. The couple is able to reunite before escaping but they are not able to find their son.

In 1967, after the Six-Day War, the couple is able to return to Haifa for the first time to see the house they left behind. I will not say much more about the plot – not because what happens next is really supposed to be a shock, but because it has more emotional weight when you don’t see it coming.

This story hit me like a ton of bricks & really helped me re-engage with the Arab-Israeli conflict in a new way. I have been studying it and reading about it in an academic way for almost 8 years now and after a while it all becomes very abstract. Although this was fiction, many of the descriptions of events are historically accurate & the decisions made by the characters are decisions that many non-fictional Palestinians and Israelis have had to make over the course of this conflict. Reading this book concretized those experiences and sacrifices in a way that non-fiction has never been able to do for me.

Though this is a translated work, the translators apparently paid a great deal of attention to replicating Kanafani’s style in English & the literary style is very effective at communicating a range of emotions. During the passages describing the forced evacuation of Haifa, I felt pressed in on and panicked – I could barely breathe.

This story is incredibly complex and there is of course much more to say about it, but I’ll stop here. “Return to Haifa” was assigned for a class, but I hope to find time to finish the other stories in the book and read more of Kanafani’s work. I hope one day that my Arabic will be good enough to read “Return to Haifa” in the original.