Bis Wir Zurückkehren: Palästinensische Erzählungen

by Ghassan Kanafani

Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Ghassan Kanafani (Arabic: غسان كنفاني‎‎)

Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian journalist, fiction writer, and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Kanafani died at the age of 36, assassinated by car bomb in Beirut, By the Israeli Mossad

Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was born in Acre in Palestine (then under the British mandate) in 1936. His father was a lawyer, and sent Ghassan to a French missionary school in Jaffa. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Kanafani and his family fled to Lebanon, but soon moved on to Damascus, Syria, to live there as Palestinian refugees.

After studying Arabic literature at the University of Damascus, Kanafani became a teacher at the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria. There, he began writing short stories, influenced by his contact with young children and their experiences as stateless citizens.
In 1960 he moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he became the editor of several newspapers, all with an Arab nationalist affiliation. In Beirut, he published the novel Men in the Sun (1962). He also published extensively on literature and politics, focusing on the the Palestinian liberation movement and the refugee experience, as well as engaging in scholarly literary criticism, publishing several books about post-1948 Palestinian and Israeli literature.

Reviews

[ernst · Rating 3 out of 5]

Den Erzählungen, die hier gesammelt sind, fehlt die Formvollendung und die Konzentration der Erzählungen aus dem Land der traurigen Orangen. Oft allegorisch, stilistisch weniger sicher, mit mehr Experimenten, die nicht immer gelingen. Immer noch lesenswert, aber nicht zu den großen literarischem Leistungen Kanafanis gehörig, wie ich finde.