בין עיר לאם: ע'סאן כנפאני וסמי מיכאל בדיאלוג על חיפה

This article examines the dialogue between Sami Michael’s novel, ‘Pigeons at Trafalgar Square’, and Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, ‘Returning to Haifa’, from the perspective of the representations of the city and urban space in these works.Through a spatial reading, the article offers a new interpretation of each of these works, and of the dialogue between them. Reading the urban space in Kanafani’s novella demonstrates that at its core is a poetic-political mechanism more complex than researchers have previously noted – a symbolic chain of reflections that all refer to the homeland: the city, the building, the home and the son.A spatial reading of Michael’s novel illustrates that at the basis of this work is a sophisticated mechanism that deliberately disassembles Kanafani’s symbolic mechanism, and transfers all the emotional weight attached to the homeland onto another vehicle – that of the mother. The article exposes the ways in which these works employ the urban space within specific aesthetic-political mechanisms,and argues that understanding these mechanisms is crucial for understanding the dialogue between the nationalist-militant ethos and the humanist-universal ethos in these works, both constructed through an engagement with the urban space of Haifa