اسم الطالب :طارق قاسم
اسم المشرف: د.حنا توشية
Analysis of the Novel Returning to Haifa Ghassan Kanafani(1969)
Ghassan Kanafani's novella, Returning to Haifa (1969), tells the story of Said 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 Said, Safeyya, Miriam and Khaldun, with flashbacks into their pasts and a retelling of the events of 1948, twenty years earlier.
Returning to Haifa_ focuses on a IeW core human themes: deep loss frozen forever by memory; exile and the yearning to return, in both space and time, to what was once was, and 1orever imagined unchained, the clash of that vision with hopes for a new future, and the nature of personal identity-all these themes, inextricably intertwined with one another, are dealt with in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.