Israelis stage daring saga of the abandoned Palestinian raised as a Jew

By Donald Macintyre in Jaffa
Monday, 14 April 2008
In one of the many electric moments in The Return to Haifa, the Cameri Theatre's compelling new play opening in Hebrew here tonight, there is a heart-rending struggle between the adoptive mother of a young soldier in the Israeli army and the natural mother who has arrived with her husband in the desperate hope of reclaiming their son 20 years after she last saw him.
"Your legs did not hurt when he was in your belly," the natural mother exclaims. "Your ribs didn't hurt when he was beating you from inside. When you kissed him for the first time after he was born, your lips weren't filled with blood."
Breaking down, the adoptive mother, a much older woman, declares: "I taught him to eat, to walk, to speak, and to love. When he had bad dreams he called me 'mum'. Please go. For the kid. I'm asking. Begging."
As sheer human drama, the play, which will switch to the Cameri's main theatre in Tel Aviv next week, would be powerful enough. But what makes the - distinctly allegorical - subject matter unprecedented for one of Israel's leading theatres to tackle is the historical context: the natural mother is a Palestinian refugee who involuntarily abandoned her baby son, Khaldun, in the flight from Haifa during the Jewish-Arab war in April 1948. The adoptive mother is a refugee too, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who took over the Palestinian couple's house - and brought up their son under the name of Dov.
There will be many glitzier events to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel's foundation as a state next month. But there is unlikely to be one more intellectually daring than this production - with a uniformly impressive mixed Jewish and Arab cast - of Israeli writer Boaz Gaon's play. Daring first because it is adapted from a famous novella by Ghassan Kanafani, widely regarded as the 20th century's greatest Palestinian writer.
Kanafani, who was also the editor of the newspaper of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was killed at the age of 36 in Lebanon along with his niece when his car was blown up - almost certainly by Mossad - in an apparent reprisal for the PFLP-claimed killings of 26 people by three Japanese gunmen at Lod airport in 1972.
And daring second because the story goes to the heart of how what for Israelis is the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that ushered in the state, is also for Palestinians that of the Nakba or wartime catastrophe in which some 700,000 people had to flee their homes.
There has already been one right-wing Jewish demonstration outside Jaffa's Ennis Theatre as the play was in rehearsal and the cast are bracing themselves for another at tonight's opening.
"The play deals with the very basic elements of the conflict," the Israeli director, Sinai Peter, said after a final rehearsal this weekend. "Who are the parents of the kid? Who owns the kid? Who owns the land? ... The big victory for the play will be if people on both sides are able to start listening to the narrative of the other."
Kanafani's family, including his Danish widow, Anni, gave the Cameri rights to the story, which Peter says is a "great example" of why there shouldn't be a boycott of everything Israeli.
But while the controversy is hardly surprising, it may be missing something essential about the play, historically radioactive as it undoubtedly is. Certainly, the Kanafani narrative is much newer - and for many highly provocative - territory for the mainstream Israeli audience it is mainly targeting, than for Palestinians. "Of course I had read the Kanafani story," says Norman Issa, who plays the child's natural father, Said. "Every Palestinian knows it." Mr Issa is himself from a Palestinian refugee family and is well known to Israeli television viewers as the star of Arab Work, the successful Israeli sitcom about a Jerusalem Arab journalist.
But playwright, Boaz Gaon, points out that Kanafani's 1969 story - in which Said and his wife, Safiyya, make their fateful journey to Haifa from Ramallah when the borders open in the wake of Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War - was exceptional at the time for also treating the Jewish adoptive parents with humanity.
"He was able two years after what was for the Palestinians [another] catastrophe to look at the Jewish side and not belittle the suffering during the Holocaust," he said.
Like several of the Jewish actors, Mr Gaon comes from a family of holocaust survivors. Mira Awad, who plays Safiyya, says she thinks that both Israelis and Palestinians may react against the sympathetic treatment of the other's narrative of 1948. "Equal weight is given to both sides in the play," she says. "And neither side is exactly going to have an orgasm about that."
Erez Cahana, playing the 19-year-old Israeli soldier whose initial wholehearted identification with his adoptive parents, Miriam and Ephraim, is compounded by anger at being abandoned by Said and Safiyeh, agrees about the "balance" of Gaon's script. "The opposition to the play is quite problematic as they haven't seen it," he says.
There are some changes from Kanafani's story: Miriam, played here by the leading Romanian-born Israeli actress Rozina Kambus, has lost a son in the Holocaust, whereas in Kanafani's story she watched her 10-year-old brother gunned down by theNazis.
But the main alteration is that while the novella in effect ends bleakly with Said's declaration that only another war will solve the problem, the play, while retaining the passage, ends with an, albeit uncertain, hint of possible reconciliation between the families. At the very least, says the director, the ending is about the need "to begin a dialogue".
Mr Gaon says that Said's declaration was prophetic about the conflict that followed. "But after 30 years of war to end the play by saying you need another war doesn't seem to benefit anybody," he says. Mr Gaon insists the play is not trying to force a message on anyone. "We are trying to open people's hearts to other hearts, to other realities, to open one's eyes to see what the other side saw."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelis-stage-daring-saga-of-the-abandoned-palestinian-raised-as-a-jew-808651.html 

JAFFA, Israel (Reuters) - A Jewish couple raises an abandoned Palestinian child. Decades later the boy's two mothers meet, and, after an agonizing and high-octane exchange, they tentatively embrace.

The scene is charged with symbolism, heightened by the fact it comes from an Israeli stage production of a Palestinian novella, and is performed by a Jewish and Arab cast to mark Israel's 60th birthday.

"The Return to Haifa," a provocative new play by one of Israel's leading theatres, explores the personal suffering behind the decades-old Middle East conflict, from both an Israeli and Palestinian perspective.

"What's so special about this production is that it gives an arena for people of both sides to listen to each other's narratives," director Sinai Peter told Reuters ahead of the opening night in Jaffa, south of central Tel Aviv.

Through the stories of two couples and one child, the play evokes sympathy for both Jewish Holocaust survivors who sought a refuge in Israel, and the 700,000 Palestinians who abandoned or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the birth of the Jewish state.

Adapted by Israeli playwright Boaz Gaon from a famous novella by Ghassan Kanafani, it tells the story of Palestinians Said and Safiyeh who fled during fighting in 1948 and were forced to leave their baby boy behind.

New Jewish immigrants Miryam and Ephraim, who lost a son of their own in the Holocaust, move into the house, find the child, and raise him as their own. Two decades later, the five of them meet, and are forced to confront each other's histories.

"At the beginning it seems impossible that these people would sit down to have a dialogue," said Peter. "But the child is a sort of allegory. Who does he belong to? And there is a moment of grace where perhaps they could become one family."

MORE WAR?

The original novella ends with Said, the Palestinian father, lamenting that only another war will settle the Israeli-Palestinian problem -- a sentiment writer Gaon felt was inappropriate for the modern version.

His ending is far from rosy, but it opens the door to the chance of a more peaceful future.

"The last thing I wanted was for people to leave the theatre and rush to the front -- we've exhausted that option," he said. "I wanted to offer an opening for something else to happen."

The play, which will move to Tel Aviv's main Cameri theatre next week, has angered some Israeli right-wingers, who held small protests ahead of the opening night.

They said work by Kanafani, who was linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militant group and was assassinated in 1972, should not be performed in Israel.

"He was a killer and a terrorist," said Haim Rabinovich, who stood outside the theatre dressed in a Palestinian red checkered headdress and carrying a toy gun. "This is a play for Tehran or Ramallah, not for Israel."

But audience members were enthusiastic after the opening night this week.

Nivan Kour, an Arab Israeli who also describes herself as a Palestinian, called the play a "mirror to reality" that could help the two peoples better understand each other. Israeli Uri Yarkoni agreed.

"People need to see there are two sides to this story or we will be bombing and killing each other for another 100 years."

Return to Haifa: The Human Face of the Conflict
Elyakim Yaron

Director Sinai Peter has created a human play in which the actors enhance the drama. Mira Awad and Norman Issa are impressive in their performances as the Arab parents, while Yossi Kantz sensitively depicts the distraught Jewish father. But it is Rosina Kambus who stands out on the stage.

The story by Ghassan Kanafani and its stage adaptation deal with the heart of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, but more with its personal rather than political dimension.
An Arab couple who abandoned their home in Haifa in 1948 return to it twenty years later. They not only abandoned their home, but also left behind their infant son. A Jewish couple, Holocaust survivors who lost their son in the camps, adopt the baby as their own. Now the Arab couple wants their son back.
However, the child is now a soldier in the paratroopers with a will of his own. The dilemma is reminiscent of the dilemma posed by Brecht in his play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in which the conflict surrounding the child is merely a metaphor for land. Who does the land belong to, to its official owners who abandoned it, or to the farmers who worked and nurtured it? Stalemate.
Director Sinai Peter has created a human play in which the actors enhance the drama. Mira Awad and Norman Issa are impressive in their performances as the Arab parents, while Yossi Kantz sensitively depicts the distraught Jewish father.
But the play belongs to the wonderful Rosina Kambus, who skillfully navigates between the dramatic and comic aspects of her role as the mother. Erez Kahana displays sensitive acting as the son.
However, this symmetry of Arab actors depicting Arab characters and Jewish actors depicting Jewish ones is somewhat tiresome in its stereotyping. Had the situation been reversed, so it would seem, the play would have greatly benefited from the new theatrical tension.
Frieda Shoham has cleverly designed the house that stands at the center of the drama. This play will not resolve what generations of politicians have failed to resolve. But it does manage to illuminate the human facet of this burdensome conflict.

People Really Are Not The Problem
Michael Handelzalts, August 6, 2008

Why is the staging of Return to Haifa, which presents the Palestinian side as abandoning its land and choosing war, and the Israeli side as a reluctant occupier, regarded as courageous?
One of the easiest and more pleasant things one could do is to praise the staging of Return to Haifa at the Cameri Theatre (in conjunction with the Annis Auditorium in Jaffa). Not only is it an unconventional repertoire choice of material that the Israeli audience should become acquainted with: an adaptation of the novella Returning to Haifa by Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani; but also an emotional drama based on the Biblical story of the Judgment of Solomon: an Arab couple who were expelled-fled from Haifa in 1948 return after the Six-Day War to visit the house they used to live in. Living there is an Israeli woman, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, who adopted and raised the baby they left behind in a tragic set of circumstances when they fled.
But this is not only a plot that is suited to the telenovella genre. It is also a political dilemma with which a good repertory theatre confronts its audience: who deserves to keep the child that was abandoned? His biological parents or those who raised him? And what does the child himself think, who has since grown up and is an Israeli soldier who has fought in the defense of his homeland?

It is no accident that Bertolt Brecht framed his version of the story of the Judgment of Solomon, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a prologue and epilogue in which the child is merely a metaphor. The real story in Return to Haifa is a dispute over land, the very land on which we live and on which the Palestinians lived before us (yes, and on which we lived before that, and they, too, are still here among us), and the question is who will ultimately have possession of it, and whether it will be by virtue of justice, or force.
It is also easy to praise the production, directed by Sinai Peter. He focuses on the emotional aspect and obtains outstanding, restrained and moving performances from his actors. Norman Issa and Mira Awad as the Palestinian couple, consumed with guilt, pain and shame; Michael Teplitzky in a small caricatural role as the Israeli bureaucrat who allowed this problematic situation to develop (and which he tries to maintain); Yossi Kantz as the Holocaust survivor, the reluctant adoptive father (who died before the Palestinian couple's visit); and Erez Kahana with his sensitive and convincing presence as the son, the focus of the conflict, who is himself divided, even though reality made the decision for him that he would be Israeli. Rosina Kambus is truly magnificent as the mother, amusing and moving, human and majestic, in one of the great Jewish-mother roles.

The Land is the Problem
This play confronts the bourgeois audience with the harsh facts of the essence of our life in Israel through a prism of emotions. Thus we have to contend with the fact that we are living in their homes and on their land, even if we are not here as a result of ill-will but due to our own adversity, and our intentions (of most of us, anyway) were good. And even if we can understand their hardships, the only solution that seems possible is not rapprochement, but war, the first casualty of which will be this boy who the Palestinians gave birth to and the Jews raised.
This is where the more complex problems of the play begin, in my view. I started writing theatre reviews in 1969, so I can say that I developed as an Israeli theatre critic during the occupation era, which begins at the end of the plot of this play. I have seen all the plays that attempted to contend with the complex reality, those produced by Israeli theatre (Queen of the Bathtub, A Palestinian Woman, The Jerusalem Syndrome, Masked), as well as those produced by the Palestinian El-Hakawati Theatre Company. I have seen Israeli audiences infuriated by the very presentation of the Palestinian side on the Israeli stage, and I thought that over time this fury would abate and we would learn to see the distress of the other on the theatre stage, even if we are part of it (not the only part; they, too, bear responsibility for their situation, as evidenced by reality, and in this play as well).
I thought we would at least develop the tolerance to courageously look into the mirror of reality. But, so everyone tells me, nothing of the kind, and in fact, quite the opposite. Even the staging of a play that explicitly presents the Palestinian side as abandoning its land, as cowardly and as preferring the path of war, and the Israeli side as reluctantly finding itself in the role of occupier, aware of the problematic nature of its situation and prepared to make painful concessions - is regarded as courageous, and engenders protests from the Israeli side. About what? About the admission that the situation is an emotional conflict that has no reasonable solution? Is public courage required to make such a statement as well?
In this respect the play is a success because it focuses on the emotions of the individuals, it inspires identification, and more so with the Israeli side than the Palestinian. Perhaps theatre really can only work through the emotions. Brecht, who tried to shape the attitude of the audience to the dramatic plots he presented and lead it to alienation, did not really succeed. Incidentally, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which is the prototype for Kanafani's novella and this play, he makes easy work for himself: the real mother in his play, the wife of the governor, is a mean, covetous and manipulative mother. It is easy to be against her, even though she is the biological mother who gave birth to the child. In Kanafani's novella the child was not abandoned by his Palestinian parents by choice, but as a consequence of their helplessness. But the main point is that in the final analysis the metaphor is not the same as the message it conveys; parent-child relationships are not governed by the same rules that apply to nations and their land. "People are the problem," says Dov, the child in the dispute in the novella (not in the play). But in reality, the problem is ultimately not people but the land - even if many people are killed in the struggle over the land.

No Politics
At this juncture, a word or two should be said about the adaptation of Kanafani's novella by Boaz Gaon. The novella is written from the Palestinian couple's perspective and takes place entirely in 1967, during their visit to the house they had rented in Haifa. They recall the circumstances of their departure from Haifa, with the guilt that haunts them and their helplessness. The present owner of the house and her son are described from their perspective.
The play situates the plot in the house (this, in my view, is the play's only weakness, especially for aesthetic reasons, but that is a minor issue), which, along with the son, is the focus of the dispute. In the play we see the Israeli couple, both in 1948 when they receive the house as survivors who have themselves lost a son in the Holocaust, and in 1967 when they are prepared to accept any humane compromise that will alleviate the Palestinians' distress. We see the Palestinian couple only in 1967 when they recount what happened to them in 1948: this accords greater credibility to the Israeli side from the outset, if that were even necessary in a play intended for it. The play also shifts the focus of the dispute to the son's emotional state, whose childhood was troubled by nightmares: he is a kind of representation of the State of Israel.
In the play, when his Palestinian father asks him to take off his uniform, the son says, "Don't make a political thing out of it. I'm just hot". But the complexity of the matter is that we are here now, not in 1967. Then it may have still been possible to hope that at least some part of the conflict would be resolved humanely. But since then we have been governed by politics, as have they. Kanafani was assassinated by the Mossad in 1972. In the novella he writes that the Palestinians in the story have no way of resolving the conflict other than by war. An unpleasant truth, but woe betide the nation that assassinates people, albeit from an enemy nation, for making such statements.
Staging a play like this, with all the good intentions of connecting the audience, as human beings, to the hardships of others, human beings just like themselves, is all well and good. The problem is that this is a sad admission of the powerlessness of theatre. Politics - which, surprisingly, are made by human beings - really do not believe that "People are the problem". On the contrary, politics engage in the sacrifice of people. From a cold political perspective, people really are not the problem, they are totally insignificant. One of the reasons we go to the theatre is to indulge in an illusion that this is not the case. Then we return to reality.

In the 2003 Haifa Municipal Theatre production of The Yisraeli Family, Boaz Gaon dealt with the comedy of an unstable family (the late Yisrael Poliakov played the father), which wallowed in an impressive range of sweaty subplots. In one of them the Left-wing daughter brings home a new boyfriend called Daoud, who in the end is revealed as just another David, a Jew impersonating a Palestinian Arab in order to bed the desirable bleeding heart. In other words, the boyfriend undergoes an accelerated process of reverse equitization that only emphasizes the arbitrariness of apparently total ethic identity, and the ease with which the "Arab" can become a "Jew", and so on and so forth.
This imagery is also placed (or perhaps burned) at the focal point of Gaon's new play, Return to Haifa, which is based on a short story by Ghassan Kanafani who was born in Akko in 1936, "escaped" to Lebanon and from there to Syria in 1948, became the spokesman of the PFLP in the early 1960s, and who, in 1972, was murdered in a mysterious explosion, the fruit of Golda Meir's resolve to avenge the slaughter of the Israeli athletes in Munich. Gaon says that he came across Kanafani's text some six years ago; I have no idea if he read the story before or after completing The Yisraeli Family, but it is fascinating to identify the almost familial relationship between David and Dov, the two confused young men whose personal story is bound up in the great national narratives.
Dov, Kanafani's protagonist, is the adopted son of Ephraim and Miriam Gushinsky, two Holocaust survivors who, in 1948, moved into an abandoned Arab house in Haifa and discovered that it came, in a kind of crazy package deal, with an abandoned infant - perhaps a substitute for the son they lost in the Holocaust (in the original story the boy is Miriam's younger brother). The boy's biological parents, Sa'id and Safiyya, found themselves swept far from their home in the hysterical confusion reigning in the city at the height of the fighting. Twenty years later, in 1967, ridden with guilt and grief, they return from their exile in Ramallah to the old house in Haifa in order to find out what happened to their son. They discover that Dov - originally Khaldun - is now a heroic paratrooper who has returned from the fighting in unified Jerusalem. Although his adoptive parents have told him of his origins, Dov-Khaldun finds himself bowing under the burden of the encounter: the return of the suppressed à la Palestine of 1967.

The Mammas and the Papas
The Cameri Theatre production threatened to freak out a group of Right-wing activists, but it is interesting to discover that the Palestinians are presented in the story (or at least in the play) in a more critical way, as people who abandoned their land and their child. The Jews, on their part, are not prepared to relinquish one brick of the house, albeit it must be said to their credit that they display sympathy and sensitivity towards the victims of the war. But the truth is that this eternal competition - who suffered more, or alternatively, who is presented in a worse light - runs completely counter to the basic spirit of this story (or at least the play), a spirit of conciliation, understanding, listening and identification. The amazing empathy that Kanafani found in himself to describe, for instance, the life of a woman Holocaust survivor, blends with the strong embrace that Gaon gives the Palestinian refugee couple, and the result is an exciting and touching play, despite - and perhaps because of - the ever-so naïve tone that echoes the real story of the Judgment of Solomon. I wonder whether the decision to have Sa'id and Safiyya deliver their dialogues in Hebrew (rather than Arabic with screened translation) displays loyalty to the original story - Kanafani describes how "Sa'id was tongue-tied" as they came into Haifa - or whether it goes against him in that it does not tie his tongue, but rips it out. What is clear is that if there is a problem here, the creators' good intentions are unmistakable.
Turning materials such as these, which are symbolic to the point of being schematic, into living theatre requires not only a talented playwright (and there is no doubt that Gaon shifts with considerable success between comic moments and some choking scenes), but also a director with a sensitive eye and careful hand, a director who knows how to exploit the fact that in this story, "the words are too weak". Sinai Peter meets this challenge well, and sometimes - for instance, in the scene in which the son and his Palestinian father have a cigarette together and are shocked by the resemblance between them - he also places the most beautiful imagery on the stage. The allusive set (Frieda Shoham) corresponds with the representations of poverty and being a refugee in Israeli theatre down the generations, which frequently dealt, even indirectly, with the question of the property of the absent-present (in productions like The Street of Steps or Abandoned Property). The music, too (Mika Danny), offers a subtle variation of coexistence in Haifa.

A wonderful cast breathes life into this mathematical parable. Norman Issa (who played Daoud-David in The Yisraeli Family) and Mira Awad (who looks like Sofia Loren in a neo-realistic Palestinian film) are excellent as the Arab couple; and Yossi Kantz (Ephraim Gushinsky) and Michael Teplitzki (the official who gives him the house) are both very good and very credible. Rosina Kambus is fantastic as Miriam; every hand movement, every comic gesture is executed with the extraordinary precision that apparently only Kambus can achieve. But the real challenge of this production rests on the shoulders of Erez Kahana who plays Dov the paratrooper: in contrast with the macho soldiers that frequently populate the Israeli stage (for instance, the morons often portrayed by Liron Barness in Khan Theatre productions), Kahana presents a softer, somewhat spoilt character. Unlike his name, Dov is not a bear-like character, but at best a bronzed reincarnation of Dovik, his Jewish-Polish "brother" who died in the Holocaust. In other words, Dov is a bit of a nebbech, a kind of Dov Navon who declares that he is no longer a baby and yet there is still something babyish in him. In the first minutes it seems that his acting is somewhat slovenly, but it very quickly becomes clear that this is a brilliant ploy, whereby only thus can he cope with the story's open ending in which the confused young man - perhaps the divided child, perhaps King Solomon - sinks into a fetal position in a despairing attempt to escape the fathers and mothers standing silently behind him.

Return to Haifa, by Boaz Gaon, after Ghassan Kanafani. Director: Sinai Peter. The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv in conjunction with the Anis Auditorium.