Palestine and the Palestinians in the Short Stories of Samīra ʿAzzām

The dismemberment of Palestine in 1948 and the creation of Israel in the same year had a cataclysmic effect on the Palestinian people in all aspects of their life, but, above all in the political, social and economic spheres.' Arabic literature, in all its forms and genres, responded to this situation, offering an expression of the concerns and mood of the Arab people in this period in their modern history. Initially it was poetry which took up the challenge. But other genres soon followed suit, offering a more extensive portrayal of the event of 1948 universally called by the Arabs the nakba (catastrophe). In the fields of the novel and drama, the names of Najati Sidql and Muhammad ʿAli Bakathir readily suggest themselves, while the names of Saif al-Din al-Irani and Samira ʿAzzam come to the fore in the field of the short story. The main aim of this paper is to examine the articulation of the nakba and its effect on the Palestinian people in the short stories of Samira ʿAzzam.