I have returned to Jaffa to record with two women who spoke up at the Women's Club last year, when I visited with Leena Saraste. I make appointments with them, and Andre helps me find where they live. Last year Andre and Suher were still living in Andre's parents' home, opposite the Greek Catholic church, where Yafa street begins. Now they have an apartment of their own in a building in a more mixed neighbourhood. Independence has brought them new expenses and problems: the building's structure is so flimsy that a neighbour broke through their sitting room wall while fixing his television. There are too many children living there: entrance and stairs are littered with ice cream wrappers. The shopkeepers are rude. Andre won't let me buy a yoghurt because he's afraid they'll ask me where I'm from and I'll blurt out "Beirut". "Let them think you're an Ashkenazi Jewess!" he warns me. An apartment nearer his

work - Tel-Aviv University - would cost four times as much. Suher teaches math to primary school children, and is studying for an MA.

Andre is one of the founders of the League for the Defence of the People of Jaffa, and it's through him that I learn about Yafa's recent history, and meet most of the people I record with here. He also introduces me to Gaby Abed, co-founder of the Rabita, with whom I record for another project. Andre's family is originally from Nazareth, not from Yafa. But after 1948, when Palestinians who stayed in Israel faced unemployment and hunger, Andre's father went to Yafa in the hope of finding paid work there. Their displacement has lasted until the present, and now they feel they belong to Yafa just as much as the Yafa-ites who had left in 1948. Indeed a polemic has recently erupted between pre- and post-1948 intellectuals over who has most right to 'speak for' Yafa.