Returning to Haifa

Said and Safiyya fled Haifa during the 1948 fighting so abruptly that their infant son Khaldun was left behind in the confusion, and when the two return twenty years later, after the 1967 war opens a brief window for Palestinians to cross into Israel, they find their old house occupied by Miriam, a Holocaust survivor, and her husband, who raised the boy they left behind as their own son under the name Dov. Kanafani builds the entire novella around the unbearable calm of that visit, using a domestic reunion rather than combat to stage the deepest argument of the Palestinian catastrophe: what, exactly, does it mean to have a home, a child, a claim, taken by people who are themselves refugees from an even larger catastrophe.

Miriam's own history, having survived the Holocaust before settling in a house and raising a child that both, by any earlier accounting, belonged to someone else, keeps Kanafani from writing a simple villain into the story even as the novella refuses to let her occupation of Said and Safiyya's home go unexamined. Kanafani, himself a Palestinian refugee and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, deliberately declines to resolve that tension into propaganda, letting Said instead arrive at a harder, more self-critical conclusion about what his own generation's passivity in 1948 actually cost.

Said and Safiyya's younger son Khalid, born after they fled Haifa and raised entirely as a Palestinian in exile, wants to join the fedayeen resistance, a wish Said has spent the whole novella resisting out of fear of losing a second son. Kanafani builds the ending's real force out of that parallel rather than out of the reunion with Khaldun itself: one son was lost to circumstance and raised by someone else's grief, and what Said decides to do about the other son, the one he still has a say over, becomes the novella's actual verdict on what his generation owes the next one.