GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
‘This is as balanced a story as you can find’
Playwright ISMAEL KHALIDI talks to Joe Gill about how his theatre adaptation of the famous Palestinian novella Returning to Haifa was axed in New York, then found a home in London
Returning to Haifa
[Scott Rylander]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
BEFORE his assassination in Beirut in 1972 by the Israeli secret service Mossad, Ghassan Kanafani was one of the greatest Palestinian writers and political activists of his generation. His novella Returning to Haifa was highly influential in the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Israel seized east Jerusalem and the West Bank, which it holds to this day.
Ismael Khalidi
Kanafani got the inspiration for the book when his cousin and her husband crossed into Palestine after the June war in 1967. There they were told stories about how during the zionist attacks on Palestinian cities and villages, many families forced to leave their homes got separated during the Nakbah (“catastrophe”) in 1948 during a war in which 700,000 fled or were expelled from their homes.
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