Returning to Haifa

by Naomi Wallace, Ismail Khalidi

Overview

You haven't asked, but yes, you both may stay in our house for the time being. And use our things. I figure it'll take a war to settle it all.
A compelling story of two families - one Palestinian, one Israeli - forced by history into an intimacy they didn't choose.
In 1948, Palestinian couple Said and Safiyya fled their home during the Nakba. Now, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, the borders are open for the first time in twenty years, and they dare to return to their home in Haifa. They are ready to find someone else living where they once did, but nothing can prepare them for the encounter they both desire and dread with the son they had to leave behind.
Ghassan Kanafani's classic novella Returning to Haifa has been adapted for the stage by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. The play premiered at the Finborough Theatre, London, in February 2018 to coincide with the seventieth anniversaries of both the Nakba or 'catastrophe' - the mass dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 - and the foundation of the State of Israel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571347834
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	482,681
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Naomi Wallace
Naomi Wallace's Finborough Theatre productions include And I And Silence, which subsequently transferred to Signature Theater, New York City. Theatre includes In the Heart of America (Bush Theatre), Slaughter City (Royal Shakespeare Company), One Flea Spare (Public Theater, New York City), The Trestle at Pope Lick Creekand Things of Dry Hours (New York Theatre Workshop), The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East(Public Theater, New York City), and Night is a Room (Signature Theater, New York City). Naomi has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize twice, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, the Obie Award and the Horton Foote Award. She is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts development grant. In 2013, Naomi received the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, and in 2015 an Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her play One Flea Spare was recently incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theatre, La Comédie-Française. Only two American playwrights have been added to La Comédie's repertoire in two hundred years, the other being Tennessee Williams.
Ismail Khalidi was born in Beirut and raised in the United States. His plays include Truth Serum Blues and Sabra Falling (Pangea World Theater, Minneapolis), Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre, Atlanta) and Foot(Teatro Amal, Chile). His writing has appeared in numerous anthologies as well as in The Nation, Guernica, American Theatre, Mizna and Remezcla. Ismail co-edited (with Naomi Wallace) Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora. He is currently under commission from Noor Theatre and Actors Theatre of Louisville and is a visiting artist with Teatro Amal in Chile.