'Returning to Haifa' Links the Holocaust and Nakba Tragedies 

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• Courtesy Of Zephyr Teachout
• Ayeshah Alam and Safiya Jamali

In 1948, following the establishment of the State of Israel, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in a mass deportation known in Arabic as the Nakba, or "catastrophe." That same year, about 140,000 Holocaust survivors, most of them Jewish refugees driven from their own homes in Europe, began settling in Israel. Many took up residence in houses that had once belonged to Palestinians.

The intersection of those refugee experiences — one Palestinian, the other Jewish — is the premise of Returning to Haifa, a play by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi, which opens this week at Unadilla Theatre in Marshfield. As an exploration of the meaning of family, history and homecoming, the play couldn't be more timely. Those parallel tragedies of mass death and displacement generated shock waves that still reverberate 76 years later, as evidenced by the atrocities of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

Returning to Haifa is based on a classic novella of the same name by Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), an author, journalist and activist often called the father of modern Palestinian literature. The story is set in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel reopened its borders to returning Palestinians. A Palestinian couple, Said and Safiyah, return to Haifa in search of their lost son and the house they were forced to abandon two decades earlier.

The couple find their home occupied by Miriam, a Polish Jewish widow and Holocaust survivor whose father died at Auschwitz. Upon her arrival in Haifa, Miriam moved into the Palestinian couple's home and adopted their son, Khuldun, now called Dov, whom she raised as a Jew and who now serves in Israel's army.

Versions of Kanafani's novella have been made into movies and TV shows worldwide, in languages that include Arabic and Hebrew. Playwrights Wallace and Khalidi adapted it for the stage through a commission from New York City's Public Theater in 2018. The theater scuttled the production, reportedly in the face of political pressure from its board, and the play finally premiered in the UK later that year.

Norwich native Zephyr Teachout directs the Unadilla production. A Fordham University School of Law professor, economic justice advocate, and former Democratic candidate for state and federal offices in New York, the 52-year-old took a seemingly unlikely detour from her public policy work to her directorial debut. Years ago, she performed in numerous productions at Unadilla, where she befriended Bill Blachly, the theater's founder. Blachly, who turned 100 this year, invited her to direct the play.

Teachout recruited an impressive international cast. Ayeshah Alam, who plays the older Safiyah, is a Pakistani actor with more than 30 years of experience in radio, television, film and theater, including a production of The Vagina Monologues in Pakistan.

Safiya Jamali, the cast's only Vermonter, portrays the younger Safiyah, a role that reflects some of her real-life experiences as a Bahraini American whose parents were journalists in the Middle East. In 2018, after the Arab Spring, she and her family were forced to flee to Cyprus because of an assassination plot against her father, then a photojournalist for the Associated Press.

Jamali, who moved to the U.S. two years ago, said she'd never read Kanafani's novella before Teachout cast her in the play. But her American-born mother knew Kanafani's family and homeschooled her daughter on what she called "resistance literature."

For the 21-year-old Lyric Theatre member, who now lives in Burlington, the play is a dramatic departure from her previous roles. Before leaving Bahrain at 15, Jamali witnessed police brutality, home raids and violent military disruptions of peaceful protests. And as a member of the Shiite majority in Bahrain, who are ruled and persecuted by the Sunni elite, "I do have that experience of being dehumanized," she said.

"The reason I became an actor," Jamali added, "was because I wanted to tell political stories."

The novella's author belonged to a radical Marxist wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization and was assassinated in 1972 by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. Despite that affiliation, Kanafani was willing to criticize both Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

Jamali acknowledged that some of the author's works can be "incendiary" but said this play "does not dehumanize any characters. Each one, be they Israeli or Palestinian, is a fully realized human being, with reasons behind their actions."

Teachout agrees. She noted that the play offers audiences an opportunity to reexamine their own views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and "get unstuck and see it in a human way."

Given the play's contentious history, Teachout was asked whether she expects this production to generate protests or opposition similar to that seen at the Public Theater.

"The magic of theater," she said, "is you never know what to expect."