Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories

About the Book

At once lyrical, uplifting, and tragic, the novella and stories in Ghassan Kanafani's Palestine's Children describe a homeland and her people longing and moving towards return. These stories emerged from Kanafani's keen political understanding, reflecting the steadfastness and strength of oppressed peoples and the inherited knowledge that binds them together.

Over the brief decade of his literary career, Ghassan Kanafani became one of his people's most beloved and prolific voices. His work offers entry into the Palestinian experience of more than a century of resistance to occupation.

About the Author

Born in Akka, northern Palestine, in 1936, Ghassan Kanafani was a prominent and revered spokesman for the Palestinian struggle. Never having finished his university degree, Kanafani was expelled from school for his political engagement. In 1967 Kanafani published On Zionist Literature — a text that examines mid-century European literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Kanafani was the founding editor of its weekly magazine Al-Hadaf. His novels and short stories have been published in sixteen languages.

At his home in Beirut in 1972, the Mossad murdered Kanafani, and his 17-year old niece Lamees Najim, with a car bomb. The obituary in the Lebanese Daily Star called Kanafani "a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."

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