Two Tickets for Saffuriyeh

Yusef is thirty, but he carries on his back a seventy-year refugeeism. His grandparents were expelled in 1948 from Saffuriyeh, a village in Galilee; his parents were born in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria; and he was born in Dubai. The war in Syria displaced him yet again, this time to Europe. He lives alone in Toulouse and pours all his energy into trying to adjust to the local culture: the language, the cultural codes, the food, the new name the immigration officers gave him. He manages to get by, but he is cut off from a context, lacking a community or identity to cling to. Within this detachment he holds fast to the wish to receive a French passport that will enable him to reach the land of his fathers, in which the chain of his family’s displacement began.

Two Tickets for Saffuriyeh presents a young Palestinian voice that describes the third generation of refugeeism, the refugees who were scattered worldwide and became isolated witnesses seeking a personal–collective memory that will afford them meaning, connections, and the possibility of a homeland.

Translation editor: Muna Abu Baker

Literary editor: Dafna Rosenblit

Afterword: Eyad Barghuthy

Cover: Bashir Makhoul

Preoccupation 10, oil on canvas, 111x111 cm, 2023